Rebekah Goldstein: Paintings and Sculpture will be on view at Rosenbaum Contemporary (150 Yamato Road) in Boca Raton, Fla., from January 24 through April 22, 2023. The exhibition, a concentrated survey of Goldstein’s work, will include her rectangular paintings, sculpture and the shaped canvases she has become known for. It will be viewable during regular gallery hours, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., as well as online at www.rosenbaumcontemporary.com.
Goldstein’s work has been compared to that of Elizabeth Murray, Frank Stella and other modern and contemporary masters for her “abandonment of rectangular constraint.” Her paintings explore color, form and structure and their relationship to the human body and the built environment. They also play with perceptions of space.
“My paintings depict imagined structures and space,” Goldstein said. “Several years ago, I began to wonder what the imagery in my paintings would look like if it was an object. The imagery in my paintings informed my sculptures, which looked like forms plucked out of my paintings. These sculptures in turn influence the imagery in my paintings. Making both painting and sculpture has given me a fuller appreciation of what each can do.”
“For me, the thrill of painting is its ability to create illusion,” she continued. “The imagery can defy gravity, bend perspectives, create its own laws of perspective. Yet sculpture offers me a concrete way to create form, view space and apply color.”
Goldstein introduced paintings on shaped canvases in 2018 after the birth of her first child. “After nine months of my own shape transforming, the rectangle no longer made sense,” she said. “If the human body could shift and transform so drastically, so could my paintings. My rectangular paintings and sculptures met somewhere in the middle.” The structures from her rectangular paintings became the forms of the canvases themselves, with each painting being given a specific shape.
“The shaped canvas is such a natural meeting point between my rectangular paintings and sculptures,” Goldstein said. “It has the feeling of being an object, yet it still has the surface of a painting.”
As she begins work on each piece, Goldstein has a specific title, physical gesture, color, texture, or reference from art history, architecture, furniture, landscape or textile in mind, but both her paintings and her sculptures are created through a process of improvisation, responding intuitively to the forms, building them up and transforming them over the course of time. As she creates each piece, she approaches her work from multiple angles, resulting in shifting perspectives and surface layers that challenge viewers to consider their orientation in space in relation to the work as well as to form personal interpretations of the work as a whole.
Goldstein’s work is part of the permanent collections of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California; the MacEvoy and Wing Collections in San Francisco, California; The Fidelity Collection in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Nordstrom Collection in Seattle, Washington, as well as many private collections.
Rosenbaum Contemporary, founded in 1979, is based in Boca Raton, Florida. The gallery caters to international collectors interested in investment-quality works by Postwar, Modern and Contemporary masters and presents nationally recognized museum-level exhibitions throughout the year. The gallery also offers a wide range of free services to collectors worldwide including acquisition advice, art consulting, sourcing of artists, art collection building and management and resale of select works of art.
