Untitled

Jack Goldstein’s career encompassed film, performance, sound, painting, and writing. Associated with the pictures generation, a group of artists whose works are rooted in appropriation and media theory of the late 1970s and 80s, Goldstein painted from found images such as World War II photographs and stills of astrological and natural phenomena. Mostly made by assistants, his paintings increasingly eliminated any suggestion of the artist’s hand. In this work, Goldstein airbrushed the canvas to recreate a computer-processed image. Goldstein purposefully embedded in the painting hints of its origin, mimicking the machine-eye vision from which it was derived. With solid colors and a lack of gradation, the work reads like a map or elevation drawing. Moving from digital to painted image, Goldstein’s paintings question the relationship between subjectivity and the media age.