Jack Goldstein (September 27, 1945 – March 14, 2003) was a Canadian born, California and New York-based performance and conceptual artist turned post-conceptual painter in the 1980s.

Goldstein was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec,[1] and moved as a boy to Los Angeles, California, where he attended high school in the 1960s and started taking an interest in learning about art.

[3] The Pictures artists, including Goldstein, Robert Longo and Troy Brauntuch came to the forefront of the early-1980s and flourished to varying degrees as the decade wore on.

[4] His paintings were based on photographic images of natural phenomena, science, and technology – the result of Goldstein's intent to record "the spectacular instant," as previously depicted in photography.

[6] Using found photographs, and highlighting the reproduction or copy, Goldstein blew up details to near abstraction and then hired painters to apply them to canvases on boxlike stretchers that stand more than six inches off the wall.

Reluctant to teach rather than practice full-time, Goldstein left New York in the early 1990s and returned to California where he lived out the decade in relative isolation.

He was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial as a major film influence alongside Stan Brakhage, less than a year after he committed suicide by hanging himself[10][11] in San Bernardino, California on March 14, 2003.