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.

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