Paul Resika
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to present “Paul Resika: Flowers,” an exhibition surveying more than twenty years of the artist’s treatment of intimate still life arrangements. A dozen small scale oils comprise the show, diverging from Resika’s better known works in theme, but not form. Absent are the quiescent piers, the mesmerizing landscapes – but Resika’s masterful knowledge of light, his delicate yet forceful brush strokes and his perspicacious awareness of color are as forceful here as ever. Indeed, they run throughout as the parallel subject in his work. This is the first ever exhibition dedicated to Resika’s flower still lifes.
Paul Resika was born in 1928 in New York City. As a teenager, he studied under Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown; departing for Venice and Rome in the early 1950s to study the old masters. After casting aside Hofmann’s abstract principles, his Italian palette turned sober and descriptive. Upon his return to the United States, Resika devoted himself increasingly to the exploration of light and color, and the synthesis of abstraction and representation. Over his six decade-long career, Resika has exhibited at the Peridot Gallery, Graham Modern, Long Point Gallery, Berta Walker Gallery, Hackett-Freedman Gallery, and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. Resika is represented by Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York and Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown.
Resika’s work belongs to the collections of the Hood Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among numerous others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984) and has been elected Academician at the National Academy of Design (1978) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994).