Zvi Goldstein

Zvi Goldstein (born January 21, 1947) is a visual artist living in Jerusalem.

Goldstein was born to Hungarian-Jewish parents in 1947 in Cluj, Romania. In 1958 he emigrated to Israel. From 1966 until 1969 he studied art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, continuing his studies from 1969 until 1972 at the department of sculpture at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. Following his studies he worked in Italy and travelled widely in Europe and the United States until 1978 when his new artistic strategy took him back to Jerusalem. Since 1981 Goldstein acts as lecturer and later professor at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In the 1990s a number of carefully prepared travels took him to particular places in Greece, Turkey, Asia and mainly in Africa, following a quest for cultures and sites still under a strong non-Western and hermetical tradition.

During the 1970s Goldstein worked within the tradition of conceptual art using photography, film, audio recordings, performance, objects, and not at least text as his media exploring perceptional, social and political phenomena. Discontented with the Post-Modern discourse in the West, in 1978 he decided to choose Jerusalem as a place on the edge between Orient and Occident and made it the geographical as well as conceptual base for his art. At the same time he turned to object-related sculpture based on a kind of open constructivist approach. In the 2000s Goldstein gave his work a new and additional dimension by two books, which are not written in his mother tongue(s) but in a particular kind of English, both readable and idiosyncratic, to fit into the dominant language of global communication. In On Paper (Cologne 2004) stories and reflections on subjects like autobiography, gardening, philosophy, war, art theory, or lifestyle blend into an impressive picture of his position between different cultures. The book was followed by a long poem titled Room 205 (Cologne 2010) which describes the musings and hallucinations during a one-minute open-eye recall.

Selected solo-exhibitions:

• 1975 – The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
• 1983 – The Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel
• 1986 – Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany
• 1987 – Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
• 1989 – Kunstraum München, Munich, Germany
• 1990 – D.A.A.D. Galerie, Berlin, Germany
• 1992 – De Appel, Amsterdam, Holland
• 1993 – The Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Canada
• 1995 – Mala Galerija, Moderna Galerija, Ljublijana, Slovenia
• 1998 – Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany, and Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany

Selected group-exhibitions:

• 1974 – Contemporanea, Area Aperta, Rome, Italy
• 1978 – Kulturhaus, Graz, Austria
• 1987 – Documenta VIII, Kassel, Germany
• 1988 – Aperto 88, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy
• 1990 – The Ready Made Boomerang, The 8th Biennial of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
• 1995 – New Orient/Ation, The 4th Biennial of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey
• 1998 – Biennial of San Paolo, San Paolo, Brazil.
• 2000 – The Oldest Possible Memory, Sammlung Hauser und Wirth in der Lokremise St. Gallen, Switzerland
• 2002 – Startkapital, K21 Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 2005 – EindhovenIstanbul, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• 2008 – The 6th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China.
• 2010 – The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

• The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
• The Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel
• Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Krefeld, Germany
• Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France
• Sammlung Hauser und Wirth, Switzerland
• F.C. Flick Collection

• 1984 – The Sandberg Prize of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
• 1985 – Mies van der Rohe-Stipendium (artist in residence), Krefeld, Germany
• 1987- Aaron Levi Prize of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
• 1988 – Prize of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Israel
• 1990 – D.A.A.D Berliner Künstlerprogramm (artist in residence), Berlin, Germany
• 2002 – The LennonOno Grant for Peace, New York

• Zvi Goldstein, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, 1975
• Zvi Goldstein – Structure and Super-Structure, The Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1983
• Zvi Goldstein – Die Sprache des Bauens, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany, 1986
• Zvi Goldstein -Tiers-Monde et Monde 3 – Modeles Anomaux, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1987
• Zvi Goldstein – The Glory of Abstraction, Kunstraum München, Munich, Germany, 1989
• Zvi Goldstein – Black Hole Constructions, D.A.A.D. Gallery, Berlin, Germany, 1990
• Zvi Goldstein, De Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1992
• Zvi Goldstein, Mala Galerija, Liublijana, Slovenia, 1995
• Zvi Goldstein, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, 1995
• Zvi Goldstein – To Be There, Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Oktagon, Germany 1998
• Zvi Goldstein – Sirocco – Day 4, 24th International Biennial of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil 1998

• Zvi Goldstein, On Paper, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, Germany, 2004 (= Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, vol. 29)
• Zvi Goldstein, Room 205, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, Germany, 2010