Art Career
In the mid-1960s, Gerstein left Bezalel and enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Chaplain Midy. After two years in Paris, he moved to New York and attended classes of the Art Students League, where he learned portrait painting and printmaking.
Gerstein returned to Israel at the age of twenty six and began teaching at Bezalel. At first, he taught drawing and then became a faculty member of the Department of Jewelry Design, which was then undergoing a process of renewal under the direction of Aryeh Ophir; evolving from the outmoded, tradition style of "Bezalel" to introducing innovative concepts influenced by modern art. Due to his background in the fine arts, as opposed to jewelry design, Gerstein was responsible for closing the gap between jewelry design and the world of modern art. He exposed his students to contemporary movements, such as Danish design, expressionism, conceptual art, minimalism, and other forms. He wanted jewelry design to be considered in the same light as contemporary art, no less inferior for being decorative; equal to other forms of art. Years later, Gerstein remarked that his involvement in teaching in the department influenced his transition from painting to sculpture
In 1973–1974 Gerstein earned an M.A. in graphic arts at St. Martin's School of Art in London. Having learned lithograph and silkscreen printing in that framework, he sought to combine the two media, which had not as yet been integrated. Upon completing his studies he was awarded first prize and two awards for excellence in an end of year competition at St. Martin's. Gerstein returned to Bezalel and applied some of the ideas he had formulated during his M.A. studies. He used silkscreen techniques, prevalent in modern art at the time, to the medium of enamel. Already then, his tendency to integrate different mediums and advanced technologies in creating art was discernable; a tendency that would be reflected more strongly in his use of laser in the '90s. He continued in his position as senior lecturer at Bezalel until 1985.
Gerstein's first exhibition in Israel was held in 1971 at the Engel Gallery in Jerusalem, comprising figurative drawings and watercolors. Thereafter, he exhibited at Jerusalem's Artist's House in 1972 with large oil paintings dealing with interiors and the seaside, work that received enthusiastic reviews. Among others, Gerstein was compared to David Hockney due to the fact that "like Hockney, he, too, had been first and foremost a master drawer with an excellent color sense". During those years, Gerstein led a struggle to legitimize figurative art, anomalous in the mainly conceptual Israeli art scene. The conceptual art trend was irrelevant for him and he chose the less accepted orientation at the time, figurative painting. Gerstein numbered among the few artists, such as Avraham Ofek, Ivan Schwebel, Avishai Ayal, Uri Lifschitz, and others, who focused on narrative-figurative painting.
At the same period, parallel to conceptualism, an opposite trend developed: hyper-realism, inspired by Israel Hirschberg. Here, too, Gerstein did not find his place. He aspired to creating figurative paintings informed by a personal, free style; an "accessible" art. Gerstein would later explain his approach by comparing it to a literary work whose greatness lay in its different levels, so that it could be enjoyed both as a story as well as on a "deeper reading". Gerstein sought to make statements about the world and life, inter and intra-relationships and interactions with the environment, and less about statements concerning the language of art, per se. Gerstein painted memories from his past such as his mother riding a bicycle, or a childhood painting by him and his brother. Among his main inspirations was the work of Hanoch Levin who presented life's vanities in a vein of comic irony. Gerstein aspired to do the same in painting: "I tried to express in painting what Levin wrote: relationships between men and women, within families…a sort of grotesque painting". Another inspiration at the time was the painter George Gross, to whom he felt an affinity and who also dealt with what Gerstein termed "the human comedy". In addition, he was influenced by David Hockney, Fernando Botero and José Luis Cuevas, who all dealt with the human experience and people' interactions.
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