Paul Resika
Paul Resika: Sun, Sea, Surf, Sand
April 23 – May 29, 2026
Reception: Thursday, April 23rd from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Paul Resika. This is the artist's sixteenth solo show with the gallery.
This exhibition will be comprised of eight recent paintings finished over the last year. As their titles suggest, the Beach paintings depict a beach distilled down to three horizontal bands that stretch the length of the canvas: the sky, the sea, and the sand. In these heavily-impastoed paintings, Resika applies quick brush strokes and kinetic daubs of paint that evoke the shimmer of the summer sun. Two paintings called, The Sea and The Sea #2, replace the lower expanse of sand with a frothing surf. Painted with a combination of active brush strokes and paint squeezed directly from the tube onto the canvas, the surf appears to break against the foreground of the picture-plane itself.
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: Sun, Sea, Surf, Sand will be on view from April 23 – May 29, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 23rd 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.