Abbey Golden (b. NY, 1986) is a Los Angeles based artist whose work blends classical technique with contemporary cool. Through her paintings, Golden constructs and excavates a personal mythology, using color, light, and form to capture fleeting moments; to make the ephemeral endure.

Her practice is defined by a vivid interplay of color and emotion. Sun-drenched pastels and unexpected palettes give her work a luminous, dreamlike quality, while her mostly female figures, both surreal and tender, convey the strange, vulnerable poetry of inhabiting a body.

Golden’s fleshy, archetypal subjects appear caught in moments of reckoning with their own imperfect humanity. By deliberately simplifying place and context, she creates scenes that hover in ambiguity, inviting viewers to complete the narrative for themselves. Her curiosity around family, motherhood, Jewish heritage, and queer identity quietly shapes these works, infusing them with emotional and cultural resonance.

Her background as a fabric specialist informs the organic patterning and tactile richness of her paintings, while her early training in Florence grounded her in the traditions of oil painting and art history. This dual influence, material sensitivity and classical rigor, gives her work both sensuality and depth, with references that are embedded rather than overt.

The roots of Golden’s artistic life can be traced to childhood trips into Manhattan with her grandmother, Julia “Gamma” Levien, a pioneering Isadora Duncan dancer and bohemian feminist. Levien taught her that art was not a pastime but a way of life, practiced daily. Their pilgrimages to New York’s great museums cracked open the limits of suburbia, revealing a wider world of possibility just a train ride away.

Golden received her BFA in Fine Art and Art History from the University of Arizona in 2008 and studied traditional oil painting at the Florence Academy of the Arts in 2006. She has also completed coursework at FIT in New York and OTIS College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Showing and selling her work since her teens, her paintings now live in private collections around the world.

Golden is certified in safe studio practices and works exclusively with solvent-free, eco-friendly materials.