By: Sophia Dekel Caspi

The work “Head” from 2010 was created as part of a series of eight paintings, which were exhibited in 2012 in Garbian’s solo exhibition, Forth Nights, in the Jerusalem Artists House.

The inspiration for the series came from anonymous photographs published between 1915 and 1918, after the Armenian Genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire during WWI. In 1915 about 5,000 Armenians escaped to Musa Dagh (“Mount Moses” in Northern Syria), where they were entrenched for forty days. The Jewish-Austrian writer Franz Werfel wrote about the days in Musa Dagh in the book that gave the exhibition its title. Today it is thought that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed in this cruel, barbarian act. The photographs showed decapitated heads of women and men, mouths wide open, like a frozen scream, and by them the soldiers of the Empire, proud of their booty.

Garbian, a painter and a sculptor, graduate of the Beit Berl Academy of Arts, separates and commemorates these anonymous victims, one by one, in a fearless close-up, with expressive brush strokes. The victim’s open mouth is a black whole, alongside bright red colors and intense light illuminating the facial spasms. Garbian’s detailed account is reminiscent of the wartime expressive portraits prints of the Spanish court painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) (especially the series Los Caprichos), as well as the open-mouthed portrait Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1959) by English painter Francis Bacon (1907-1992). It is no coincidence that Garbian choses to treat each image personally. It is an act of compassion that restores their human dignity.