Rebekah Goldstein creates colorful, abstract paintings with their own internal logic that emerge from the process of painting itself. She obsessively layers, reworks, and redefines the composition, often in drastic ways, and incorporates visual influences including from art history, architecture, furniture and textile design, and abstract human form. In this act of searching and redefining, her works reflect the shifting perspective of a personhood built over time.
Goldstein began her shaped canvases in response to the birth of her first child, as pregnancy and childbirth created an awareness of her own shifting, transforming body. While abstract, these paintings reference the body in scale, gesture, and form. Playfully combining expanses of saturated color with painterly gesture, her works invite viewers to situate themselves in relation to the composition and consider their own orientation within the spaces that her large-scale canvases evoke.
Goldstein received an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and BA from Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, and has completed residencies at the Arad Arts Project, Negev Desert, Israel (2005); Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL (2012); and Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New Berlin, NY (2015). Recent exhibitions include group exhibitions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA (2024); Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, San Rafael, CA (2025); and Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR (2022). Her work is held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR, as well as notable private collections including the Fidelity and Google Collections.
Photo: Airyka Rockefeller
