Joshua Neustein

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.

Neustein has a diverse artistic practice that includes painting, drawings and works on paper, large-scale installation, film and video, performance, and monumental land art works.

Neustein's work is held in numerous public institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Morgan Library, the Israel Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum, Albright Knox Gallery, and others.

In recent years, Neustein's work has been included in several group exhibitions at museums and galleries, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Haus Der Kunst, Munich, and David Zwirner Gallery.

Art historians Robert Pincus-Witten, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Arthur Danto, as well as philosophers Hilary Putnam and Martin Jay, have written extensively about Neustein's work.

Between 1964 and 1998, Neustein was represented by Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York and Jerusalem.

Neustein began to show regularly in Israel and the UK, starting his "Carbon Copy Drawing" series in 1970 by "marking" carbon paper stationary with cuts, tears, and folds.

However, it was his 1971 Jerusalem River Project (made in collaboration with Gerry Marx and Georgette Batlle) -- a site-specific "sound sculpture" action in which loudspeakers installed across a desert valley played the looped recorded sound of a river—that earned him more widespread recognition.

Photo documentation of the piece was shown at the Israel Museum, Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, MAK Vienna, and MACBA.

Curator Yonah Fischer supported Neustein's work, including him in several exhibitions at the Israel Museum such as Concept Plus Information, and assisting in the realization and display of The Jerusalem River Project.

During the same period, Neustein started to build an oeuvre of large torn paper works that received critical attention.

In the same period, Neustein began an extensive and innovative drawing practice that continues today, amassing a large body of work that grew to include torn and folded works on paper, erasure drawings, magnetic "drawings", and the Carbon Paper or Carbon Copy Drawing series, in which formerly standard carbon copy paper is torn, folded, pressed, and scraped.

Between 1973 and 1977, Neustein showed at the Yodfat Gallery and Naomi Givon Gallery, in Tel Aviv.

Neustein participated in the landmark Beyond Drawing show at the Israel Museum in 1974, curated by Yona Fischer and Meira Perry Lehmann.

In 1976, Neustein enacted Territorial Imperative, in which the artist documented a dog marking his territory along the Israeli-Syrian border in the Golan Heights, identifying spots the dog had marked with posters and maps.

In 1977, the Tel Aviv Museum mounted a ten-year retrospective of Neustein's works on paper, curated by Sarah Breitberg.

Neustein repeated the action in Belfast, Northern Ireland between the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods (1977); in Kruså, Denmark, at the German/Danish border (1978); and near Kassel, Germany, along the East and West German border, as a participant in Documenta 6 (1977).

Over curator Manfred Schneckenburger's objections, Neustein's work was "withdrawn" from Documenta, after the German government advised the artist that his piece caused "consternation among specialists" about what they described as the "complicated relationship between West Berlin and the German Democratic Republic."

In 1979, Neustein had a solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in which he showed reconstructed canvases.

In the mid-1980s, Neustein produced maps painted on canvas and cardboard, or etched into rusted metal.

Notable examples include Still Life, 1983, in which the life-size silhouette of an Israeli war plane was singed into the turf on the Israel-Lebanon border with burning tires.

In the 1990s, Neustein returned to large-scale installation, with a series of environmental works he called the Five Ash Cities.

He worked closely with Wendy Shafir, who was alternately his dealer, curator, and collaborator.

The Ash Cities were immersive, room-sized relief maps of cities, constructed out of packed ashes that rested on the floor of the exhibition space.

They often included crystal chandeliers installed to hang low to the ground, so they nearly touched the ash-covered floor.

Ash Cities were realized at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, North Carolina; the Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw; moCa, Cleveland, curated by Jill Snyder; Bilder Sind Verboten at Martin Gropius-bau, Berlin, curated by Eckhart Gillen and Amnon Barzel; and the Herzliya Museum, curated by Wendy Shafir.

In 1990, another chandelier work, How History Became Geography was exhibited at the Barbican Centre, London.

Documentation was later shown by the Israel Museum.

In 1992, the Albright Knox mounted a solo show of Carbon Copy Drawings which travelled to the Grey Art Gallery at NYU.

In 1995, Neustein was selected to represent Israel in the Venice Biennale.

For The Possessed Library, curated by Gideon Ofrat, Neustein had two large cranes parked nearby the Israeli Pavilion, the facade of which he surrounded with construction scaffolding.

Plexiglas panels etched with book titles lined the scaffolding, resembling books on shelves, while bubble wrap sacks hung suspended from the cranes, one just above the pavilion's roof, the other dipping in through a skylight in "The Tosca Room".

"The Tosca Room" walls were covered in soot, while its floors were strewn with terra-cotta letters under plexiglass.

A solo show of his "magnetic drawings" were shown at Wynn Kramarsky Gallery in 1998.

Alongside his studio practice, Neustein has mounted large-scale installations throughout his career that often included quotidian objects such as hay bales, boots, pinecones, and rainwater, as well as monumental land art works.

Neustein was among the first artists to introduce environmental and installation art into the Israeli art scene.