Raffi Lavie, born in Tel Aviv in 1937, referred to himself as a "self taught" artist. He was one of the founding members and organizers of the Ten Plus group in 1965 and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem held a retrospective of his paintings in 2003.
A far reaching influence in the history of Israeli art, his body of works will be exhibited at Israeli Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.Painted at the time Lavie's work came of age, the artist employs his familiar visual language of scribbled and hatched lines and pink and pale blue color planes in the present lot.
Structurally divided into a formal syntax consisting of three friezes, the arch joins these shapes, providing a kind of stage in which the artist places two rows of stars of David. They unfold, as if in a performance, from amorphous forms into the recognized symbol of the Jewish nation.