Eliahu Gulkowitz (later Gat) was born in 1919 in the small town of Dokshitz in what is now Belarus, to a Lithuanian Jewish Zionist family.
Gat was among the founders of the Group of Ten, which held its first exhibition in February 1951 at Beit HaOmanim in Tel Aviv, home of the Israeli Artists Association.
The group consisted of Gat, Elhanan Halperin, Shoshanah Levisohn, Ephraim Lifshits, Moshe Propes, Shimon Zabar, Dan Kedar, Claire Yaniv, Nissan Rilov and Zvi Tadmor—all graduates of the Stematsky–Streichman studio.
Gat's letters from his sojourn in Paris testify to his artistic confusion and to his spiritual and physical tribulations: he said, “I taught I would paint a little in the evenings and bought a blue lamp, but so far I haven’t succeeded.
“One of the “Nine” published an open letter in the press to the effect that “we are all committed to the idea that the way to achievement is through the adherence to reality, i.e., to our daily life in Eretz Israel.
to adhere to that trend here in this country and in these times of acute social crisis is merely to copy obsolete things from an alien reality.” On formalism he says: “Our problems are not of creating forms, but of giving shape to a particular content.
Why should we make mathematical calculations or formal trickery out of our landscape, cities, villages or maabarot, when they are of profound significance in their realistic forms?” The article was written from a distinctly class-conscious viewpoint: “The time has come to pay our debt to society, to transform art from a luxury, snob-value item for the elite, to a product for the masses.
Undefined and cosmopolitan, the works float beyond time and place, beyond life's problems.” Gat was enamoured of colours containing “Oriental” characteristics such as is prominent in Islamic decorative art.
The artist tended toward a treatment of architectonic themes, such as the facades or roofs of houses, and, as strange as this may seem in light of the group’s ideology, his paintings became increasingly stylized and abstract.
The leftist ideology, which at the beginning of decade had preached an art engage, adherence to realism and a non-elitist and non-individualistic approach, lost much of its vitality (among other things due to the change in relationship of the "Progressive Culture" circle to the Soviet Union and the 1954 split in Mapam).
Gat's abstract painting from 1961/2 constitutes a sharp, unequivocal stylistic turnabout, an open departure from his work of the immediate past.
In the same period Gat joined various organizations of abstract painters, the most important of which was that resulting in the "Tazpit" exhibition (Israeli painting and sculpture) at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1964.
Most of the paintings were inspired by Ein Kerem and Safed, arid landscapes penetrated here and there by paths which dictate the pictorial rhythm.
The different patches of the painting carry equal weight and project a uniform energy, a pictorial translation of the mountain's burning haze.
The brushwork, applied in a wide smooth sweep or in short rhythmic dabs' provides the direction, kneads the material texture and creates the forms, all at the same time.
The critics (Yoav Bar El, Ha'aretz), evaluating these works' found in them distinctive local values, and an "explicit Israeli identity, the peace and dusty quiet of the country's landscape, " in the nature depictions.
Gat's landscapes of the 1970s and 1980s represent the artist's familiar haunts: Safed, Zikhron Yaakov, the Jerusalem Hills, Sinai.
Gat applies the impressionist principle that contrasting or complementary colors placed one beside the other in equal intensity radiate a strong, vibrating, multifaceted light.
Gat employs his concept of color to convey the blazing Mediterranean sun, the earth, from the sands and the flesh of the mountains.
By intentionally admixing strong colors to create a synthesis of contrasts ("in this country both the light and the shade are hot"), he joins an Israeli impressionist landscape tradition which developed in the thirties under the influence of French painting ("painting the landscape, we have no choice but to be impressionists" Menahem Shemi said at the time).
The line, rather than forming a structural foundation, constitutes a driving force, the embodiment of energy and movement in the painting process.
It does not serve to separate areas; on the contrary, it unifies them with its vibration.the contour lines of the objects blend like arabesques in the general weave of the brushstrokes.
Thus Gat creates a uniform surface reminiscent of abstract painting which, in addition to its identification as a landscape having a spatial depth and linear perspective, constitutes yet another level of interpretation.
The principle informing Gat's nudes and still lifes is pantheism—the unification of all natural elements—flora, mountains, hills, people,—into a single vibrating whole.
In the same period he painted a green nude in which one type of brushwork was used over the entire surface so that the body's contours dissolved into their surroundings.
The flesh of the figure is treated similarly to the features of landscape which always, as noted, constitutes a background to the picture, and the same color principles are applied to both.
There are instances where the nude is depicted as a continuation of the landscape, for example when a path seen through a window seems to travel into the room up to the body of reclining woman.
The indoor scenes are always represented close to the window-sill, tending to slide outwards, or even to form an integral part of the outside.
In Gat's case, nudity constitutes a complement and interpretation of the landscape, its sensuality and its repose, and of the artist's erotic relationship to it.
The group was established in the wake of the Yom Kippur War "to point to the necessity of raising the public's consciousness of its Israeli identity in all cultural spheres."