Paul Resika
Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon
April 18 – May 31, 2024
Reception: Thursday, April 18th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Paul Resika. This is the artist's fourteenth solo show with the gallery.
This exhibition will be comprised of eight recent paintings finished over the last year. The compositions in these works continue to build-on, or rather remove-from, the artist’s “End of Day” series, which depicted pared-down sunsets over the ocean horizon. This series is even more minimal. The canvases are predominantly empty, painted in single hues ranging from terra-cotta to cerulean to goldenrod and executed in passes of rhythmic brushwork. Sometimes there is a single circle, signifying the moon, sometimes not. A few canvases also delineate the horizon with a single, abbreviated line. One painting, Cobalt Galaxy, is the largest in the show and measures 75 x 65 inches; it features many orbs and circles and calls to mind the artist’s “Ponds” series from 2010.
In the second gallery, there are two pictures. End of Day #12 is the largest of that series and painted by Resika last year at the age of 95. The foreground of the composition is dominated by an imposing black sea that gives way to an acid-green horizon. A sun hangs low in the chartreuse-colored sky. The second picture, Moonlight, was painted between 1943-44 and finished when Resika was only sixteen years old. Though diminutive in size – it measures only 8 x 12 inches – it can be seen as a mysterious harbinger for the great artistic career that laid ahead of the artist at that time. And now, eight decades later, as it hangs across from the haunting End of Day #12, it serves as both a pendant and definitive testament to the incredible artist legacy Resika has forged.
Paul Resika (b. 1928, New York, New York) studied under Hans Hofmann as a teenager in New York and Provincetown before departing for Venice and Rome in 1950 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 eight decade-long career, Resika has exhibited at the Peridot Gallery, Graham Modern, Long Point Gallery, Provincetown, Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, Meredith Long & Company, Houston, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York. Resika splits his time between New York and Truro, Massachusetts.
Resika’s work is included in the collections of the Hood Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Addison Gallery 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).
Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon will be on view from April 18 – May 31, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Thursday April 18th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.