Rebekah Goldstein at CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions
Sure sorts of geometric abstraction yield to the lure of the formed canvas. Rebekah Goldstein, the San Francisco–based mostly painter identified for her beautiful formalism, has now joined the ranks of artists equivalent to Elizabeth Murray, Harvey Quaytman, and Frank Stella in her abandonment of rectangular constraint. Goldstein’s magnificent present right here—crammed with boldly coloured formed work whose elegantly convoluted kinds dialogue with a choice of linear and quietly voluptuous sculptures—makes no bones about claiming area.
Though her work will not be three-dimensional, they have been impressed by the three-dimensionality of the physique in the course of the bodily modifications of being pregnant. Channeling the contortions required by an expectant mom to slot in—be it to a seat on the bus or some proscribed notion of what an artist must be—Goldstein’s work push in opposition to rectilinearity, at the same time as their blueprint-like linework underscores their creator’s architectural creativeness.
Concurrently curvy and awkward, angular and sensual, these full-figured canvases converse a language of painterly androgyny, whereas their titles, equivalent to Chasing My Tail, 2022; Cry into My Cocktail, 2021; and Crawling Again to You, 2021, parody the abjection of despair and want. But it’s hardly solely their carnal geometries that matter. Goldstein’s palette of sizzling pinks, maroons, coppers, and flesh and wooden tones—mixed with steely grays and greens that alternate between being sickly and luxurious—is dynamized by semi-sheer brushwork that cascades over her matte fields like voile on pores and skin. By activating the push/pull of shapes each summary and corporeal, her interlocking kinds evoke the complicated transformations that ensue once we acknowledge the opposite as each an extension of the self and a problem to its limitations. In Goldstein’s work, this impact is equally true of the relation between mom and youngster, and between portray and sculpture.
— Ara Osterweil
