Haines Gallery is pleased to present The Shape of Looking, a group show that highlights three distinct approaches to contemporary abstract painting. The exhibition brings together painters — Rebekah Goldstein, Ricardo Mazal, and David Simpson — whose practices draw on color, form, material, and process as primary vehicles for meaning. Abstract art invites sustained looking, revealing more over time.
Rebekah Goldstein
Born in 1982 in San Jose and now living in San Francisco, Rebekah Goldstein creates her vibrant pieces through layering, reworking, and redefinition. Her shaped canvases draw on autobiographical, personal, and art historical references. The shapes began as a meditation on her own body’s changes during pregnancy and have evolved into explorations of form, line, and color. Tell Me Like You Mean It (2026) explores negative space and interlocking shapes reminiscent of early 20th-century movements such as Constructivism and Cubism. The soft contours and color seem to grow out of the stripped-away presentation of abstract images into precise geometric forms in a nod to Post-Minimalist works from the 1970s. Goldstein informs these traditions with her own distinct relationships to saturated color and improvisational gestures.
Ricardo Mazal
Ricardo Mazal was born in Mexico City in 1950. His practice is inspired by sacred sites and traditions across cultures, combining imagination, place, and memory, allowing the viewer to travel in their mind’s eye. Mazal is well known for works inspired by places — the villages of his native Mexico, Germany’s Black Forest, and Mount Kalish in Tibet. Simplifying the strata into pure form, Mazal’s abstract paintings suggest light through tree branches, ice, snow and time of day. In Silence for Sofi P I (2026), a flat white section cuts diagonally from the top left to the lower right, suggesting a snowdrift, with brushstrokes left in to suggest its icy texture. Mazal’s process often begins with pilgrimages during which photos are collected and later translated into paint. His new work develops earlier approaches featuring gestural lines into resolved compositions. These paintings will be shown alongside collaborative pieces — handmade silk panels made with Zapotec artisans from San Pedro Cajonos, Oaxaca, where traditions of silkworm cultivation and natural dyeing have been passed on through generations.
David Simpson
David Simpson, born in 1928 in Pasadena, Calif., and residing in Berkeley, is a pioneer of Bay Area abstraction. Simpson’s signature style creates effects via interference pigments, an acrylic paint containing mica-coated particles that interact and refract light. The minimalist-influenced works shift and shimmer as they respond to light and the changing viewpoint of the audience moving through the gallery space. Each painting shifts in hue and depth depending on the viewer’s position and ambient light. Simpson was a part of the California Light and Space movement, forming a singular, unfolding exploration of the optical possibilities of painting materials. The paintings appear monochromatic at first glance, but subtle chromatic variations unfold over time, fostering a sense of curiosity and a changing experience of a seemingly fixed surface.
Contemporary abstract painting continues to evolve, revealing new possibilities. The Shape of Looking presents abstract art as a dynamic. The pictures are a mode of inquiry whose meanings change depending on points of view, time, and sustained looking.
The Shape of Looking is on view at the Haines Gallery in Fort Mason Center through Sept. 5.
