Joshua Neustein

born 1940, Danzig, Germany / Poland
"A Destination is a Tautology", 1973

RARE, Original Hand-Signed Mixed Media Painting -

Dated 1973

Artist Name: Joshua Neustein

Title: "A destination is a tautology", 1973

Signature Description:
Signed in English in pencil and dated "73" lower left
Titled in English lower right,

Technique: Mixed media on paper

Size: 70 x 100 cm / 27.56" x 39.37" inch

Frame: Unframed

Condition: Very good condition

Artist's Biography:

Joshua Neustein, an American - Israeli visual artist, was born in Danzig, Germany/Poland in 1940.

At age 11, his family moved to New York, where he studied for five years in an Orthodox Yeshiva. He then studied at the Pratt Institute of Art, and in Art Studio League, in New York City. 
In 1964 Neustein immigrated to Israel and in 1979 returned to New York City, where he lives today. He taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. 
In the late 60s and early 70s Neustein was a central figure in the Israeli community of artists and one of the pioneers of contemporary art.
In 1968 he created the first major environmental work in Israel, in the Jerusalem Artists' House. In this work he displayed thousands of old army boots that filled the rooms of the house. 
Neustein is known primarily for his environmental installations and Post-minimalist torn- paper works, as well as his series of large-scale map paintings.
He is considered one of the founding fathers of Environmental Conceptual Art in Israel. 
Neustein's work over the last decade revolves around the existence of the Israeli Jew and the Jew in exile, focusing on issues of territoriality and mobility, which is why the map is a central theme in his work. 
Joshua Neustein lives and works in New York and Tel Aviv.

Education
Pratt Institute, New York
Art Students' League, New York

Teaching
1968-1978 Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Art Department
1978 Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Head of the Art Department

Awards and Prizes

1970 Erest Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Jerusalem
1972 Jerusalem Prize, Municipality of Jerusalem
1974 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
1986 Fellowship, The Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation
1990 Grant, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, USA

Environmental Sculptures

the creator, together with Gerard Marks, of the first major environmental art work in the country- a display of thousands of pairs of old shoes scattered among the rooms of the Artists' House in Jerusalem.

Joshua Neustein is recognized today as the founder of Israeli conceptualism and earth art. His most notable exhibitions include the germinal 1971 Jerusalem River Project, the 1995 Venice Biennale (representing Israel), and lauded 2010 installation Margins at the ROM's Institute for Contemporary Culture, commissioned to respond to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. His oeuvre displays vested interest in erasure, trace, layering, luminosity, process work and obsolescence.

Joshua Neustein (born 1940) is a contemporary visual artist living and working in New York and Tel Aviv. He is known primarily for his environmental installations and Post Minimalist torn paper works, as well as his series of large-scale map paintings.
He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Environmental, Conceptual Art into the Israeli scene.
He was a teacher at Bezalel Art Academy.

Early Career, 1964-1971

Neustein was born in Danzig, Poland. After studying painting at the Pratt Institute in New York, Neustein immigrated to Jerusalem in 1964. He began to show regularly in Israel and the UK, but it was his ambitious 1971 Jerusalem River Project (collaboration with Gerry Marx and Georgette Batlle) action, a site-specific “sound sculpture” in which speakers installed across a desert valley played looped sounds of a river, that earned him more widespread recognition. Photo documentation of the piece was shown at the Israel Museum, Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MOCA LA, Tokyo Museum of Art, MAK Vienna and MACBA. During the same period, Neustein built an oeuvre of large torn paper works that received broad critical attention from writers such as Joseph Masheck, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Noel Frackman.

Major work, 1971-78

From 1971 until 1998, Neustein showed at the Bertha Urdang Gallery in Jerusalem and New York. Bertha Urdang served as his dealer until her retirement in 1998. In 1970, Neustein began his Carbon Series, a series of drawings created by creating cuts, tears, and folds in carbon copy paper. Acclaimed art critic Robert Pincus-Witten wrote about the work in "The Neustein Papers", 1977. Neustein performed "Territorial Imperative", in which he visited Golan Heights and the Israeli/Syrian border (1976), then Belfast, Northern Ireland (1977), Kassel, East/West border (1977), and Krusa, German/Danish border (1978) with a male dog that urinated on the land at each site. His large-scale installations from the time included quotidian objects such as haybales, boots, pinecones, and rainwater. During the same period, Neustein began a long, innovative exploration of drawing, amassing a large body of work that includes torn and folded works on paper, erasure drawings, and the carbon series. Neustein participated in the landmark Beyond Drawing show at the Israel Museum in 1974, curated by Meira Perry Lehmann.

New York, 1978-1990

Neustein returned to New York in 1978 and opened a studio in Soho, where he continues to live and work today. He joined the Mary Boone Gallery that same year, where he showed his Folded Canvases. During this period, Neustein showed frequently in Israel and New York. He began to explore maps in the mid-80's, through large-scale paintings on canvas and images scraped into rusted metal.

Archives and Ash Cities, 1990-1999

In the 90's, Neustein returned to large scale installation with his series of environmental installations, the Five Ash Cities. These were gallery-wide site specific floor maps of cities constructed out of packed ashes. The works often incorporated large ceiling-mounted crystal chandeliers hung low above the floor, or resting in a mound of ashes. The Ash Cities were created at SECCA North Carolina, curated by Jeff Flemming; ICC Warsaw, Poland, curated by Krukowski; ICC Cleveland, Ohio, curated by Jill Snyder; Gropiusbau, Berlin, curated by Amnon Barzel; and the Herzliyah Museum, Israel, curated by Wendy Shafir.

In 1995, Neustein represented Israel in the Venice Biennale with "The Possessed Library", curated by Gideon Ofrat. The work addressed issues of archiving and memory, and referenced Giacomo Puccini's Tosca opera, in which the villainous Baron Scarpia has a torture chamber in his library. Neustein surrounded the facade of the Israeli pavilion with scaffolding and plexiglas panels etched with book titles in English, Braille, and Hebrew. Bubble wrap sacks hung suspended from two large parked cranes, one just above the pavilion, and one dipping in through a skylight in "The Tosca Room". Inside the pavilion, Neustein mounted the "Baron Scarpia Archive", a room full of archival boxes, slides, and microfiche. "The Tosca Room" was surrounded by etched plexiglas panels covered in soot, while the floors were covered in ashes, terra cotta letters, and panels of glass on which viewers could walk. A soundtrack of Puccini's famous "E Lucevan Le Stelle" aria being whistled was played on a loop in the space.

In 1996, Neustein's work was included in The Arturo Schwarz Collection exhibition at the Israel Museum.

Recent work, 2000-present

In the 2000s, Neustein contributed to solo and group shows at the Herzliya Museum Tel Aviv, Palazzo Delle Arti Napoli, the Venice Biennale, and the Chelsea Art Museum. In 2002, the JCC New York commissioned an original work to be installed permanently in the lobby, a life-size bronze cast of a tree with terra-cotta colored letters climbing its trunk. In 2004, Neustein completed a video piece titled "Luftkissen", shown at Shering Fine Art, Berlin (2004), and the Haifa Museum of Art (2006). Neustein participated in Dangerous Beauty at the Chelsea Art Museum, which traveled to the Palazzo Delle Arti Napoli in 2007 (under the title Belezza Pericolosa).

In June 2009, Neustein created Margins, an on-site installation at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. The installation will remain through March, 2010.

Short list–major works

Rainwater (1968), Boots 1969, Jerusalem River Project(1971, Road Piece (1971) Hay Bales an Hay Bindings(1972,'73, '99, Dead Sea Journey film made from 3 postcards(1971), Mobile Landscape (1974), Territorial Imperative (1976,77,79), Where Are the Miami Indians (1983), How History Became Geography (1990), Still Life (1983), Still Life on the Border (1993), Possessed Library (1995), Five Ash Cities(1996,97,98,2000), Blind Library (1998), Fanning the Fear (2003), What Did I Forget (2004),

Painting and Drawings Earliest works: Oil pastel paintings; torn folded drawings; carbon copy series; text by Barry Schwabsky. Albright Knox Gallery 1992; Grey Art Gallery NYU 1993. Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe essay Torn Grey Impermanent. Artforum Summer 1978

Was part of an art movement called Epistemic Abstraction by Robert Pincus-Witten see Eye to Eye: 20 Years of Art Criticism, Robert Pincus-Witten, Paperback 1984).

Installations:

• Neustein's Rainwater 1968 in which water trickled down a suspended metal tube from roof onto a pan on the floor. Boots Gallery House Jerusalem 1969.
• Boots 1969 (collaboration with Gerry Marx) piles of military boots from armies that passed through Ottoman, Palestine and Israel
• Jerusalem River Project 1971 (Collaboration with Gerard Marx and Georgette Batlle.) Sound sculpture of taped water sounds in a dry valley (wadi). Was exhibited in Boston Museum of Fine Arts Earth Air Fire Water in 1971 Neustein was the first to introduce environmental/installation art into the Israeli scene.
• Photo strategies Barrier Piece Israel Museum 1971, Photo Triennale Israel Museum 1975, Arkwright Arts Centre London 1972. Listening to Hay Gallery House London 1972, Sound Sculptures Goethe House London 1972
• Hay Bales 1971 bales of hay and sound tapes of highway traffic, Tel Aviv Museum 1971
• Hay Bales and Hay Bindings Gallery House London UK 1971
• Photo Strategies Israel Museum 1971 Camden Arts Centre London UK
• Sound tapes and video pieces Gallery House London. 1971
• Territorial Imperative Golan Heights, Krusa Denmark, Kassel Germany (commissioned then rejected by Dokumenta 1977) realized in Belfast, Northern Ireland 1976-79
• Still Life 1983 Burnt Airplane; Lebanon/Israel Border. How History Became Geography 1990 Barbicam Arts Centre, London. Possessed Library Venice Biennale 1995 made of soot, books, cranes, alphabet, glass, scaffolds, whistling sounds. 5 Ash Cities 1996- made of tons of ashes and chandelier; SECCA North Carolina; CCA Cleveland; Gropius Bau Museum Insel, Berlin, Germany 1998; Ujazdowsky Palace CCA Warsaw, Poland; Herzeliya Museum Israel. 2 Essays by Arthur Danto Unnatural Wonders Farrar Strauss Geroux 2005; Blind Library Tel Aviv Israel 1998;

Bibliography
The authors, curators, and critics who have written about Neustein's work include: Maia Damianovic, Arthur Danto, Yona Fischer, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolf, Dr. Moti Omer, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dr. Irit Rogoff, Raphael Rubinstein, Barry Schwabsky, Wendy Shafir, Manon Slome, Dr. Kristine Stiles, Yigal Zalmona.

Additional Information:

Joshua Neustein (born 1940) is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in New York City.
He is known for his Conceptual Art, environmental installations, Land Art, Postminimalist torn paper works, epistemic abstraction, deconstructed canvas works, and large-scale map paintings.

Neustein was born in Danzig (present day Gdańsk, Poland). As refugees, his family immigrated to the USSR, Austria, and finally settled in Brooklyn in the early 1950s. After studying history at CCNY, and painting under Willem de Kooning at the Pratt Institute in New York City, Neustein immigrated to Jerusalem in 1964.