Jack Goldstein (1945–2003), who was born in Montreal and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, became a key figure of the Pictures Generation, the artist movement that shunned traditional art forms and appropriated images from advertising, television, and popular culture.

His work is characterized by radical reduction, technical brilliance, and conceptual focus. At the beginning of his career, he created Post-Minimalist sculptures and performances. In the 1970s, he made experimental 16mm films such as The Jump (1978) in which a diver from Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia seems to jump into a void—a symbol for Goldstein’s own grappling with presence and erasure. Other videos, too, such as Shane (1973) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975) explore the power of film images. 

In the same period, Goldstein began doing sound pieces and produced the series A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records (1976), in which he combined sound effects from feature films to create sound artworks. Starting in 1980, he produced noteworthy large-format Photorealist paintings of natural phenomena, war scenes, and technological pictures, which consisted of illustrations from newspapers and magazines that his assistants had painted according to his directions. It was important for him to have as much distance to the work as possible and to minimize personal artistic style.

Whether sculpture, film, sound, or painting, Goldstein’s art revolves around transience, invisibility, and the mechanisms of reproduction through the media. He cleverly achieves a balance between spectacle and vacuousness. His suicide in 2003 marked the end of an oeuvre that had a considerable influence on an entire generation of younger artists—however, in Switzerland it was largely overlooked. Together with MAMCO Geneva (Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), private lenders, and thanks to a permanent loan from the Jochen Kienzle Foundation, the Kunst Museum Winterthur presents a representative selection of paintings, films, and records for the first time.

Curated by Lynn Kost