Jack Goldstein valuation

Jack Goldstein (1945–2003) was born in Montreal to a Jewish family and moved to Los Angeles as a child. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and was in the first graduating class of CalArts, where he studied under John Baldessari and took an MFA in 1972. In the late 1960s he made Minimalist sculptures of wooden blocks balanced by gravity, and in the 1970s short 16mm films, among them a loop of the MGM lion (1975), and vinyl records edited from stock sound effects. He showed in Pictures, the 1977 exhibition organised by Douglas Crimp and Helene Winer at Artists Space, New York, and is counted among the Pictures Generation with Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and James Welling. From 1980 he made large paintings with smooth, photographic surfaces from appropriated images of the Second World War, lightning storms, exploding nebulae and computer-generated abstraction, executed by assistants working from his photographs and instructions. His retrospective, Jack Goldstein x 10,000, opened at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2012 and travelled to the Jewish Museum, New York, in 2013. MoMA, the Whitney and Tate hold his work.

His paintings are mostly acrylic on canvas, and there are also works on paper in charcoal, acrylic and metallic paint, as well as the records and films. The paintings have smooth, glossy surfaces on which any scratch, scuff or abrasion shows, so condition is the first thing to check. A buyer will also want the date of the work, its title or number, and a gallery invoice or other record of where it came from.