Galerie Buchholz presents our fourth solo exhibition of Jack Goldstein (1945-2003), focusing on three groups of work by the artist: his early sculptures, his sound works on vinyl (we show a complete overview), and his text works. These conceptual pieces represent a counterpart to his well known, visually rich films and paintings. They claim an important place in the artist’s work, emerging from postminimalism, far from negating visuality, they prompt an invocation of imagery in the mind.

This exhibition was conceived in conversation with Helene Winer. As curator of the Pomona College Art Gallery, Winer organized Jack Goldstein’s first institutional exhibition in 1971 and then realized important projects and exhibitions with Goldstein at New York’s Artists Space and Metro Pictures gallery, which she founded with Janelle Reiring. She helped to introduce us to Jack Goldstein in Los Angeles at the end of the 1990s when we first met him and began working together.

We would like to thank Helene for her continuous support. We also thank James Welling, who was a friend of Jack Goldstein’s starting in the early 1970s. In 1977-78 he photographed Goldstein’s studio in Los Angeles and took portraits of him, which are on view in the exhibition, alongside two watercolors, one from 1977 and one from 2024. Welling wrote an autobiographical text about his time with Goldstein, which is on display in the exhibition. Chris Capuozzo was Jack Goldstein’s assistant in the late 1980s and produced the Totem Portfolio with him. On view here is his scrapbook from the time when he collected examples of so-called Clipart, which was an important inspiration for Goldstein’s Totem works and was partly incorporated directly into the Totems. John Kelsey’s essay on Goldstein’s text works, the first text that deals exclusively with this group of works, is available in the exhibition in an extended form.

We would also like to thank the art historian Alexander Dumbadze, who will be publishing a new monograph on Jack Goldstein next year, and Moritz Wesseler, whose father Jürgen Wesseler held an exhibition with Jack Goldstein at the Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven in the late 1970s. Moritz Wesseler made his father’s archive available to us and provided rare ephemera for the exhibition. We also thank Klaus Görner, curator at MMK Frankfurt, who made a comprehensive documentation of the vinyl works by Jack Goldstein. In addition, we would like to thank Susanne Gaensheimer, Brian Butler, Philipp Kaiser, Margaret Zwilling, Ryan Muller, Malte Lin-Kröger and the Städtische Sammlung Erlangen.