Artist, left-wing activist and writer Yair Garbuz dies at 80

Prominent painter, writer, satirist and veteran left-wing activist Yair Garbuz died on Wednesday after battling cancer.

He was 80 years old.

Born in 1945 in Givatayim to parents who immigrated from Poland, Garbuz studied painting with the prominent teacher and critic Raffi Lavie, and at the Avni Institute.

He held his first solo exhibition in 1967, already featuring what would become his trademark techniques of collage, portraits, and text.

American Pop Art paintings inspired Garbuz’s artwork, as seen in his use of layers of collage, photography, mixed media, and text.

Garbuz took photographs and newspaper clippings and pasted them on plywood that served as his work surface. His wife, whose name was kept private, was often his model in his artwork.

Garbuz exhibited dozens of times at galleries and exhibitions around Israel and the world and published books of satire, memoir, poetry, and essays.

He was active on the cultural commentary circuit, writing for Davar Aher, a satirical supplement of the newspaper Davar, which earned him the Sokolov Prize, a journalism award.

He also hosted a satirical television program on Channel 2 and appeared as a panelist on cultural programs.

Until 2011, Garbuz was the head of the Midrasha Art School at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba.

He received the Emet Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to society, in 2004 and, in 2015, was awarded the Rapaparot Prize for an Established Israeli Artist at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

A longtime backer of the left-wing Meretz party, Garbuz caused an uproar during the 2015 Knesset election campaign when he spoke at a rally in Tel Aviv and decried the left’s loss of the country to a “handful of amulet-kissers and idol-worshipers.”

The comment, perceived as an inflammatory attack against the traditional and religious community, Sephardi Jews and the right wing in general, drew condemnation from across the political spectrum and was seen by some as a factor behind the center-left Zionist Union’s election loss to the Likud party’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite leading in polls for much of the campaign.

Garbuz remained relatively silent in public after that speech, insisting in several interviews that his words had been distorted and he wasn’t referring to Mizrachi Jews.

In 2017, then-education minister Naftali Bennett blocked Garbuz from receiving the Israel Prize due to that remark.