REBEKAH GOLDSTEIN: Release Me

CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to present Release Me, Rebekah Goldstein’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from October 21 through December 10, 2016. Release Me features a series of new paintings and sculptures by the San Francisco based artist.

Goldstein’s paintings depict imagined structures and spaces that push the boundary between abstraction and traces of the familiar. Each painting relies on and creates its own internal logic. Ignoring laws of gravity and perspective, Goldstein’s paintings portray structures that could only exist within the world of a painting – the perspective is warped, the figure and ground constantly flip and the structure appears to simultaneously hold together and fall apart. In contrast, the sculptures – as if plucked from the paintings into real time and space, are beholden to the natural world of physics, reliant on gravity and an actualized physicality.

Goldstein sites the experience of color – how it creates form, shape and space, as well as the references that it holds for the viewer – as an essential exploration of her practice. For this new body of work, Goldstein has pulled palettes from art historical paintings. The palettes initially served as a starting point for her paintings, which are unplanned and improvisational, but soon became an examination of her personal relationship to the history of painting. The warm colors of a Pierre Bonnard painting, seen on a rainy morning at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, served as inspiration for “Last Splash.” “Watch Me When I Walk Away” combines the palettes of paintings by Georges Braque and by Hans Holbein the Younger. Although these works are from vastly different time periods and impacted her at very different moments in her life, they coexist through the process of painting. By quoting these palettes, Goldstein explores the temporal nature of color, as well as its ability to conjure memory and associations.

As personal experience is attached to color, the forms in the paintings suggest personal narrative as well. Although the references are subtle, Goldstein alludes to the figure, visible in the curves of the line or the vertical nature of the forms. Says Goldstein: “I see these structures as figures each taking a pose, sometimes awkward and complicated. As they pose the figure is in a state of flux – disappearing, becoming architecture, becoming environment, shifting between categories, becoming ambiguous.” The rendered structures are thus symbolic of the body, each depicting different emotional states and portrayed in varying degrees of composure and disarray.

Her sculptures, twisted forms painted with patterns and highlights of bright hues, spring to life from the forms within the paintings. These objects inform the painting process and assert a dialogue with the paintings. As the viewer shifts their gaze between the 2D surface of the paintings and the embodiment of the 3D structures, a clear pictorial language is made evident.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Goldstein received an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004. Her work has been exhibited at CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions (San Francisco), Jack Geary Contemporary (New York), The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), City Limits (Oakland), George Lawson Gallery (San Francisco), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), 100% Gallery (San Francisco), TMoro Projects (Santa Clara), The Battery (San Francisco), Alter Space Gallery (San Francisco), Pro Arts (Oakland), and Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley). Goldstein has been awarded residencies at the Sam and Adele Golden Center for the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Arad Arts Project. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as well private collections throughout the Bay Area. She is represented by CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions.