Continuing to July 3, 2025

While painters as a rule content themselves with rectangular surfaces, there are notable exceptions. Frank Stella chose shaped supports for his early- and mid-career geometric paintings and late three-dimensional constructions. Elizabeth Murray found in them the perfect vehicle for her effusive expressionistic work. Bay Area painter Rebekah Goldstein devises her singular approach to this unusual format, grounded in the formal disciplines of Cubism and Constructivism filtered through the idiosyncrasies of her own temperament. 

Goldstein’s current show includes twenty-three oil paintings, most on shaped canvases and panels, and interspersed with rectangular works. Goldstein adopted the shaped canvas around 2018, a development she attributes to the recent birth of her daughter and her own erratic shape during pregnancy. The show’s title, “Full Length Mirror,” and the titles of several of the paintings refer to mirrors and portraits. We can assume that she sees the paintings not just as formal exercises, but as subjective self-portraits. “What is a painting if not a mirror?” Goldstein asks rhetorically.

“Well-Made Woman” (2025) greeting us at the gallery entrance is a knockout. A bubblegum pink, bringing Philip Guston to mind, dominates this angular work, which is accented by bits of bright orange, blue, alizarin, and black and white lines. An irregular trapezoid creates a horizontal plane that weighs anvil-like from above. Peek-a-boo brushwork and bold lines feel completely surefooted. Painted shadows create the illusion of depth, and what appear to be carved-out sections reveal themselves to be the white ground of the unpainted canvas.

“But Never in the Mirror” (2024) feels rich and eloquent, with purples blending into blue-black, violet blending into magenta, and brushy strokes of pink set atop a pale lavender background. Goldstein cites Joan Brown’s painting, “The End of the Affair” (1977) as an inspiration. The relationship is a bit amorphous, although one may note echoes of Brown’s work in color choices, the gestural brushwork, and, naturally, the quality of self-reflection, literal in the narrative work, conceptual in the abstract. While the Bay Area Figurative painter is not an obvious choice for an influence, Brown’s irreverent attitude certainly seems to resonate with Goldstein’s assured and seemingly unfiltered approach.

Four small shaped works are hung on the left side of the main gallery, “The Tourist and the Purist,” “Rising Sign,” “Midnight Snack” (each 2025), and “Magic Mirror” (2024), all consisting of oil paint, papier-mâché, molding paste, and cardboard on panel. They offer an appealing balance of physicality and allusion, with blocky passages of luminous colors broken up by thick, blurry lines suggestive of stained glass. 

These small works at times serve as a repository for assorted bits of stuff, collaged or maybe just randomly landed on the canvas, blobs of crusty paint, even some overpainted staples. All speak to the mix of uncertainties and processes in the studio. The thick, blurry lines in black, purple, deep ultramarine, and a searing hot pink take on great significance at this small scale, and these compact but powerful works are among the best in this aesthetically buoyant show.

“My Better Half” (2025), a rectangular work in blues and creams, and “But Never in the Mirror” (2024), a shaped canvas focusing on dark blues and violets, feature dividing lines ending in broad curves that visually traverse the terrain of the paintings like winding roads on a map. “My Better Half,” with its push-and-pull interplay of translucent planes and ethereal blue, subtly ventures into narrative territory. A shape suggesting the letter “H” sprouts extending limbs and assumes a figurative role, reprising the mysterious presence intimated in earlier works. Goldstein, like Kandinsky, might almost have been booted out of the Constructivist camp due to alleged “mysticism.”

“Daydream Fever” (2025), with its browns and yellows, feels like a question — why this shape? why are these pieces collaged with such precision? — but ultimately these odd color choices and quirky forms appear inevitable. Redolent of tobacco leaves and newspapers, executed with an economy of means, the work effortlessly evokes the Cubism of a century ago but does not depend on it.

Goldstein is among the best mid-career painters in the Bay Area. Her work conveys a deep, indeed spiritual commitment, although, as is the case with many contemporary artists, her painting practice is a secular form of devotion. Steeped in the past but with a fresh, contemporary feel, Goldstein’s work offers us reassurance in the enduring possibilities of painting.