SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Haines Gallery is presenting The Shape of Looking, a group exhibition bringing together three abstract painters—Rebekah Goldstein, Ricardo Mazal, and David Simpson—whose practices draw from associative and perceptual shifts, engaging color, material, and process as primary vehicles for meaning. While working with distinct concerns and sensibilities, each artist approaches abstraction as an open field shaped by perception, memory, and the physical properties of their chosen media. Whether through Goldstein’s playfully charged, shaped canvases, Mazal’s meditative, research-driven paintings, or Simpson’s light-activated Interference series, the works on view invite sustained looking, revealing themselves over time. Together, these artists foreground abstraction as a dynamic mode of inquiry—one that remains deeply connected to both the perceptual world and lived experience.
Rebekah Goldstein (b. 1982, San Jose, CA; lives and works in San Francisco) creates vibrant abstract paintings that emerge through an iterative process of layering, reworking, and redefinition. Drawing on autobiographical, art historical, and architectural references, Goldstein’s compositions develop an internal logic as they are created. Her shaped canvases, which began as a meditation on her own body’s changes during pregnancy, have grown into complex studies of form, line, and negative space. New works, such as Enough About Me, Let’s Talk About You For A Minute (2025), feature loosely interlocking shapes that recall early 20th-century movements such as Constructivism and Cubism, while their softened geometry and rounded contours evoke later design languages associated with mid-century modernism and 1970s supergraphics. Combining saturated color with improvisational gesture, Goldstein’s paintings invite viewers to navigate the relationship between her highly gestural, painterly surfaces and the emphatic objecthood of the painting itself.
Ricardo Mazal’s (b. 1950, Mexico City; lives and works between Mexico City and Santa Fe) abstract paintings invite viewers to contemplate the intersections between place, memory, and the metaphysical. Well-known for works inspired by sacred sites and traditions across cultures—from the villages of his native Mexico to Germany’s Black Forest and Mount Kailash in Tibet—Mazal’s luminous, layered surfaces evoke geological strata, dappled light filtered through tree branches, and the icy peaks of snow-capped mountains.
Grounded in firsthand engagement with these locations, Mazal’s process often begins with pilgrimages resulting in photographic studies that are translated into tactile, atmospheric paintings. In The Shape of Looking, Mazal presents new works that develop the gestural lines of his earliest paintings into more resolved compositions. These are presented alongside recent works on handmade silk panels, created in collaboration with Zapotec artisans from San Pedro Cajonos, Oaxaca, where traditions of silkworm cultivation and natural dyeing have been passed down through generations.
David Simpson (b. 1928, Pasadena, CA; lives in Berkeley, CA) is a pioneering figure in Bay Area abstraction, whose practice has remained deeply committed to the perceptual effects of color and light. Exploring a diversity of approaches since the 1950s, his work bridges minimalism, hard-edge abstraction, and the California Light and Space movement, forming a singular and sustained exploration of painting’s material and optical possibilities. Since the 1980s, Simpson has developed a highly refined approach using interference pigments—paint that shifts in hue and depth depending on the viewer’s position and ambient light. While often appearing monochromatic at first glance, these works reveal subtle chromatic variations that unfold over time, inviting close, sustained attention. Across decades of experimentation, Simpson’s practice reflects a persistent curiosity and a desire to expand the limits of his medium.
