SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Haines Gallery is presenting a new selection of shaped paintings by Rebekah Goldstein, whose richly worked abstractions blur the line between painting and object. The three intimately scaled works — Dial "J" For Johnny (2025), Pound For Pound (2026), and Easy Way Out (2026) — offer a close look at an artist whose surfaces are built slowly, sometimes over a period of years.

Goldstein’s paintings begin with a process that is deliberately open-ended. Color is layered, removed, covered and reconsidered, while gesture and structure compete for attention. Saturated passages of paint meet irregular edges and built-up surfaces, giving the works a physical presence that goes beyond the conventional rectangular canvas.

That sense of accumulation is central to Goldstein’s practice. Her paintings draw on autobiographical experience as well as architectural and art-historical references, but they are not planned toward a predetermined conclusion. Instead, each work develops its own internal logic as she responds to what has already taken place on the surface.

The smaller shaped panels are particularly revealing of this process. Goldstein builds them up with thick layers of paint and collaged pieces of canvas, but they can also spend long stretches of time serving another purpose inside her studio.

“After building up the relief, I keep them on my floor and use them as palettes for my larger paintings,” Goldstein explains. “They get painted over and over and over, and eventually they make it to the wall where I respond to them in a more intentional way.”

The result is a surface that carries traces of its own history. Marks that may have begun accidentally become part of the composition, while older layers remain partially visible beneath newer decisions. Goldstein has compared this gradual transformation to the “shifting perspective of a personhood, built up over time.”





That idea is evident in the three works now being offered by Haines. Dial "J" For Johnny, completed in 2025, measures 20.5 by 16 inches, while the 2026 works Pound For Pound and Easy Way Out measure 16 by 12.5 inches and 17 by 14 inches respectively. Each is made in oil and mixed media on a shaped panel and is priced at $3,200.

Goldstein’s approach gives these relatively modestly sized works an unexpectedly strong physical presence. Their irregular silhouettes emphasize that viewers are not simply looking through a painted surface, but also confronting an object occupying real space. The tension between expressive painting and constructed form has become one of the defining characteristics of her work.

The artist’s paintings are also currently included in The Shape of Looking, a group exhibition at Haines Gallery on view through September 5, 2026.

Born in San Jose, California, in 1982, Goldstein lives and works in San Francisco. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her career has included residencies at the Arad Arts Project in Israel’s Negev Desert, Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, and the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New York.

Recent exhibitions have included presentations at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon. Her work is held in collections including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Schneider Museum of Art, as well as corporate and private collections including Fidelity and Google.

With their accumulated surfaces and unconventional forms, Goldstein’s newest works make visible something that is usually hidden in the finished painting: the long, uncertain process through which an image gradually becomes itself.