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Raffi Lavie, an Israeli sculptor, teacher, and art critic, 1937 – May 7, 2007.
In his youth Lavie studied conducting and musical composition, but due to a hand injury, he decided to become a painter. In the late 1950s he created his first significant works, drawings that were similar in style to children's drawings. His works from the late 1960s show a marked similarity to the paintings of Arie Aroch and Aviva Uri.
In 1965 Raffi Lavie founded a group called "10+", which sought an alternative to the "lyric abstraction" of the New Horizons group. The group organized 10 collective exhibitions, which expressed the influence of American art, especially pop art, on Israeli art. In Lavie's work we see the use of glued objects (collage), "childish" scribbles, and painting on plywood panels, as well as the use of visual images such as street advertisements, magazine photos, etc.
In addition to his work as an artist, Lavie was a prominent teacher at the Hamidrasha School of Art, Ramat Hasharon, and later at Beit Berl. In this capacity Lavie nurtured a group of artists with a penchant for conceptual art. The works of his students and, in particular, the works of Lavie himself, were the inspiration for Sara Breitberg-Semel's thesis "The Want of Matter", which she presented in 1986, and in which the image of Lavie appears as the "ultimate Israeli Sabra."
For most of his life Lavie opposed all iconological interpretations of his works, embracing instead a modernist-formalist interpretation. In his work Lavie emphasized the Ars Poetica approach to works of art, using a formalistic confrontation between the various elements of composition in a way that eliminated the illusion of depth. Nevertheless, toward the end of his life, he agreed to certain content-related and literary interpretations.

Education

Art Teachers' Training College for the Labor Movement, Tel Aviv
1954-1956 Studied painting with Ludwig Mus

Teaching

1966 Art Teachers' Training College, Ramat Hasharon
1970-1961 Ramat Hasharon HIgh School
1999-1965 Beit Berl College, Faculty of Arts
1970-1969 Bat Yam Art Institute
Art department, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, 1970-1972

Awards And Prizes

1978 Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa