Paul Resika

Bookstein Projects is pleased to present Recent Paintings (Part II) by Paul Resika, the artist’s thirteenth show with Bookstein Projects.

Paul Resika Recent Paintings is an exhibition in two parts. A full-color catalogue with an essay by Vincent Katz is available.

The second part of the exhibition features two monumental square paintings – Cerulean and Tangelo – each measuring 76 x 76 inches and depicting vast triangles that resemble sails. In the catalog essay for the exhibition, Vincent Katz writes, “There is something Platonic about some of the imagery in these paintings. It is based on intense observation, years of looking, during which the artist has consolidated in his mind essential aspects of what things look like. This ideal image, if it is that, is then disrupted, or made alive, by the actual application of paint. Looking, thinking, painting, and rethinking affect each other, each adding to the project, each capable of suggesting adjustments, until the very last minute.”

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).