REBEKAH GOLDSTEIN: Passenger

CULT is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with San Francisco based artist Rebekah Goldstein. The exhibition, Passenger, opens on September 12 and runs through November 1st, 2014 with an artist reception on Friday, September 12 from 7-9 pm.

Rebekah Goldstein’s paintings depict imagined structures, spaces and characters that obscure the boundary between representation and abstraction. She synthesizes imagery from her immediate surroundings: patterns found on clothing, succulents and palm trees, the human figure and architectural tableaus she builds in studio. She considers the paintings a staging of fragments, akin to collaging. The fragments are generated by an iterative process of translating forms and images between large paintings, small paintings, and sculptural forms. What was once recognizable becomes increasingly ambiguous, idiosyncratic and part of her own pictorial language. The three dimensional tableaus, made out of wood, ceramics and paint, inform how she shapes foreground and background in the two dimensional paintings. Moving back and forth between bodies of work and media, the shapes, symbols and colors are expressed as characters appearing across multiple paintings.

In this recent suite of paintings for Passenger, re-occurring elements suggest a loose, open-ended narrative of a mysterious figure that is at once present yet absent/hiding in all of the work. The canvas becomes a stage upon which the painterly fragments and symbols theatrically perform. The paintings draw on various art historical themes, including the Cubist still life, the avant-garde theater set, Op art, and geometric abstraction. Elements of everyday surroundings – parts of architecture, the living world, and human form – intersect with art historical references, creating forms that blur the lines between categories.

Rebekah Goldstein received an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012 with a focus on painting, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004. She has participated in residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida, and the Arad Arts Project, Israel. She has had a solo and two- person exhibitions at 50 Fremont in San Francisco, City Limits Gallery (Oakland), and TMoro Projects (Santa Clara), and group shows at the Battery (San Francisco), Alter Space Gallery (San Francisco), Pro Arts (Oakland), and Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley). Rebekah is the founder of the Painting Salon, a monthly forum that fosters conversation about contemporary painting practices. Rebekah is represented by CULT / Aimee Friberg Exhibitions.