Jack Goldstein - 80s New York Friday, December 17, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Metro Pictures, New York

  • Catalogue Essay


    Looking at these images, we think of the Northern Lights, sunspots, mushroom clouds or volcanic explosions seen either from a great distance or in greatly magnified detail. These events are depicted to meticulous, if not obsessive, perfection through a procedure that involves a great deal of taping and stenciling, and that leaves very little indication of human involvement. Each color of the spectrum has its own separate physical layer. Both process and result suggest topographical maps, but – even though there’s an inclination to read the darkest colors as ocean depths and the brightest as mountain ranges –here it is the topography of light and hue that is being charted. These are images of nothing, of ‘’the spectacular instant’’ (as Ronald Jones writes in his catalogue essay), painted with exacting verisimilitude. The best thing about Mr. Goldstein’s new work is the bright, hot, dematerialized color – green, yellow or pink – that each canvas builds up to or gives way to, usually isolated at its center like some irregular land mass or cloud. Also good are the little terraces, the ebbing and flowing waves in which the color moves - and it really does move - with rhythmic, filmic regularity. It is a little as though a film of some passage of light has been reduced to a single surface, or, conversely, as if painting’s optical effects have been extended into real time.
     
    (Roberta Smith "When Photography became Postmodern," The New York Times, June 29, 2001)

18

Untitled

1986
Acrylic on paper.
33 3/4 x 64 1/2 in. (85.7 x 163.8 cm).

Estimate
$20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for $40,000

80s

17 December 2010
New York