Gary Goldstein, Pop Art Large Signed Aquatint Ice Cream Cone Etching - Sugar Lift & Spit Bite

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Gary Goldstein’s body of work includes drawings, objects, artist books and paintings. It is informed by Pop Art, Surrealism, Dada … Read more Gary Goldstein’s body of work includes drawings, objects, artist books and paintings. It is informed by Pop Art, Surrealism, Dada and Illuminated Manuscripts. Goldstein’s work draws inspiration from popular sources such as comic books, magazines, advertisements and soft porn from the 1940’s and 1950’s, as well as Kabalistic amulets and the Talmudic page. A well known Israeli art critic, Smadar Shefi, calls Goldstein “a one-man art movement”. Goldstein created his own unique visual language, symbols and style, which uses repetition of both means and images. It is comprised of a personal, private stream of thoughts, of images, of feelings.
Goldstein has exhibited extensively in Israel, the United States and Europe. His work is in major museum collections such as Tel Aviv Museum, Israel Museum, Victoria and Albert museum, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art and N.Y. Public Library.

Goldstein has published 14 artists' books, including two limited editions in collaborations with Yehuda Miklaf, John Cage and Arturo Schwartz.

Since 1984 till today Goldstein has worked on pages of used books which he finds in second hand book stores. He created over a hundred fifty unique altered books. In the last two decades he creates series of intimate, autonomous drawings, which he draws on pages, cut apart from used books. There is often a great intricacy of details. The layers of meaning are belied by the appealing graphic appearance of the work. The drawings are made in series and each series captures, preserves and archives a particular time in Goldstein’s life.

Gary Goldstein was born in Nashville, Tennessee and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied for his B.A. in Syracuse University, N.Y , followed by an M.F.A in 1977 from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y.. In 1977 Goldstein moved to Israel and was a member of Kibbutz Afikim until 1981. While living in Kibbutz Afikim, he founded an arts program at Beit Yerach Regional High School, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In 1981 Goldstein moved to Jerusalem, where he resides and works till today.

Goldstein taught studio art as well as art history for many years in various art schools in Israel including Kalisher School of Art, Kaye Academic College and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

In 2007 Goldstein received the Israeli Minister of Culture Prize for the Visual Arts.

Today Goldstein devotes full time to his art. He continues to exhibit his works in galleries and museums.

Artists' Books 1984-1994

For a period of ten years Goldstein created unique artists' books, drawing on every page of second hand books, creating a kind of journal and collection of images. When addressing this period he recalls: ‘There was something liberating about the private and personal interaction with a bound book, holding the book in my hands, close to my body, creating a private intimate art work’.
Objects

Alongside his work on books and drawings, Goldstein has created a body of small-scale found objects which he covers with Tipp-Ex, on which he draws in black ink. As a child of immigrants and Holocaust survivors he became fascinated with the power of objects and the power of symbols. He was raised in a house bare of family photographs and objects that could transmit memories from one generation to the next. The objects Goldstein creates include everyday found objects such as spoons, knives, which possess both a decorative and ironic sense. See less