Born in Eretz Israel in 1945 Garbuz studied painting with Raffi Lavie. He subsequently abandoned abstraction for subject matter, albeit expressed through formal means. Collages of photographed objects and printed captions, combined with interplay of line and color, create compositions conveying a content of personal, cultural, and social significance. The artist expression is deliberately simple and undecorative: "poor" materials - a plywood support, white paint applied with coarse strokes, and letters copied in Letraset with little regard for smooth finish. Garbuz employs the written text as a conceptual element of artwork. Words and sentences transform the painting into a narrative, and some of his works have indeed used by the artist as scripts for films. Garbuz took part in the activities of 10+, a group of artists who joined forces in the 1960s and 1970s, united by their Tel Aviv background. They worked together on exhibitions and shared an ambivalent approach to the sacred myths of their parents as well as to questions pertaining to Israeli art, deliberating whether it should be national or international in outlook, committed to topically or to abstraction.
Studies: With Rafi Lavie; Avni Institute, Tel Aviv.
Prizes: 1999 IDB Prize for an Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Jerusalem;
2000 Minister of Science, Culture and Sport Prize.
Exhibition: 1968 Bucharest Romania, "The Israel Painter".
Director of Art Teachers' Training College, Kalmania.
