Jack Goldstein

METRO PICTURES opens its exhibition season in its new gallery space at 150 GREENE STREET with recent paintings by JACK GOLDSTEIN. The exhibition of ten large color paintings opens on Saturday, September 24, and extends through October 22.

The paintings, which range in size from 8 foot square to 8 by 14 feet, are amongst the first of Goldstein's recent color work to be seen in New York (one large painting of a lightning storm was shown last year at White Columns along with the artist's films and records of the mid-seventies). Paintings from this color series were seen in Europe in recent one-person exhibitions in Munich, Brussels, and London, and in museum group exhibitions in Bologna, Zurich, and Bonn. A painting from this group is included in the New Art exhibition currently at The Tate Gallery in London.

The subject of the new color work, while like the preceding black and white paintings in their concern with the awesome beauty and fearful power of the spectacular, now shift from the man-made events of war, explosions, rockets, etc., to such natural phenomena as volcanoes, lightning, or celestial occurrences. In the new paintings, the spectacle is a product of man's ability to mechanically observe and record great or distant events rather than of personally experiencing, causing or controlling them. As with his choice of images, Goldstein's use of essentially mechanical as opposed to expressive methods of producing his paintings reflects his concern with universal experience and a common language. The extraordinarily vivid color of the paintings, while fundamentally true to the recorded image that is the source, is more cinematic in its heightened intensity than any personal recollection or first-hand encounter could verify.

Metro Pictures' schedule through 1983 is:

Cindy Sherman large size color photographs
October 29 - November 26

Thomas Lawson landscape paintings
December 3 - December 31