Zvi Goldstein

Goldstein was born to Hungarian-Jewish parents in 1947 in Cluj, Romania. He is the only son of Szigmund Goldstein (born 30 August 1917), a taxi driver, and Margaret Golstein (born 2 February 1919). His father survives Mathausen and returns to Cluj, where he meets his future wife, an Auschwitz survivor. Zvi Golstein spends his early childhood in Cluj and often goes hiking with his father in the Carpathian Mountains.

He attends elementary school, during which he suffers numerous anti-Semitic attacks at and after school.

In 1958 he and his parents emigrated to Kiryat Gat, Israel, with the help of the American jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In 1962 he leaves school after tenth grade, and between 1962 and 1963 he worked at Polgat Textiles in Kiryat Gat. In 1963 Goldstein applies for the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem but is rejected, in 1964 he retries and is accepted and he begins his studies in the Graphic Department as the youngest student in his class.

In November 1964 Zvi Goldstein has to interrupt his studies at the Academy to fulfill his mandatory military service. He serves in the Israeli army for two years and four months. In January 1967, towards the end of his military service, he is allowed to return to the Bezalel Academy under certain conditions . He returns to the army to serve further two months in April and May. As a young servant, he is called for the Six-Day War In June in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Desert front. Following this he is stationed as a reservist at various locations in Israeli for the next six months. In 1968 he finally returns to the Academy but the year after he breaks off his studies to travel to Europe. he leaves with hardly any money, just one bag ad a one-way-ticket, financed by money from the Academy as the winner of the Hermann Struck Prize (with a wood engraving). In the West for the first time, he hitchhikes trough Europe (France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy) and makes a short trip to the United States, New York City, to visit Sol LeWitt, whom he knew from his time in Milan.

He enrolls at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in the Painting and Sculpture Department and makes frequent visit to the Faculty of Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Milano. In 1972 Goldstein is awarded a Diploma in Fine Arts and Sculpture and continues his studies in the Scenography Department. Later that year he has his first solo exhibition in Milan at the Galleria la Bertesca.

Zvi Goldstein

In 1973 he marries Rachel Bitran.

Zvi Goldstein moves back to Jerusalem to establish a peripheral position from which to developed a new artistic perspective. He embarks on extensive research into other contexts marginal to the West, sowing the seeds for his future travels. At the same time he becomes a lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at the Bezalel Academy of arts and Design: his first teaching post.[1]

In 1982 he is recalled to the army during the first Lebanon War and serves in patrol operations, the years after he is orderd to serve at the detention camp, where prisoners are detained without trial. Faced with this evidence of civil rights infragments, he refuses to serve as a soldier in Lebanon. He is imprisoned as conscientious objector, first at the Tzrifin military camp, near Rischon LeZion, and then in Prison Six, near Atlit. He becomes one of the first members of Yesh Gvul. Eventually he is released early from prison, but remains on the Israeli army reserve list until 1991.

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.

• 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

• 2013 - Awarded with the EMET Prize in the category Art and Culture
• 2002 – The LennonOno Grant for Peace, New York
• 1990 – D.A.A.D Berliner Künstlerprogramm (artist in residence), Berlin, Germany
• 1988 – Prize of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Israel
• 1987 - Aaron Levi Prize of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
• 1985 – Mies van der Rohe-Stipendium (artist in residence), Krefeld, Germany
• 1984 – The Sandberg Prize of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

• 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

• www.zvigoldstein.org
• https://www.danielmarzona.com/artists/zvi-goldstein/

• Zvi Goldstein, On Paper, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, Germany, 2004 (= Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, vol. 29)
• Zvi Goldstein – To Be There, Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Oktagon, Germany 1998
• Zvi Goldstein, Room 205, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, Germany, 2010
• https://web.archive.org/web/20100803072042/http://www.imj.org.il:80/exhibitions/presentation/exhibit.asp?id=724
• 1. Zvi Goldstein - The Limits of My Knowledge. Distanz. 2014. pp. 330–333. ISBN 978-3-95476-072-5.