Paul Resika: 1945 & 2025
June 18 – July 25, 2025
Reception: Wednesday, June 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 fifteenth solo show with the gallery.
Eighty years ago, in the year 1945, Paul Resika was a precocious 17-year-old frequenting the New York galleries and museums in search of the latest trends in painting. Already on his way to becoming an accomplished painter, he was inspired by the highlights of that year, which included an important exhibition of paintings by Roberto Matta at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, and an exhibition of New Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, which included La Jungla (1942-43) by Wilfredo Lam, in addition to other masterpieces that have become staples of the museum's Modern Painting Collection. In the nine works from 1945 included in this show, the viewer witnesses a young Resika wrestling with and assimilating the lessons put forth by painters on the vanguard of modern art, while trying to make them his own. It was in this same pivotal year that he joined the Hans Hofmann School of Painting, where he became Class Monitor one year later. In 1950, he went to live on the Giudecca in Venice where he immersed himself in the study of the Old Masters, copying the likes of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.
Now facing his 97th year, Paul Resika continues to make art daily, contending with those same tenets of painting: color, form and composition. The seven works from 2025 included in this show represent a renewed commitment to his mentor and teacher Hans Hofmann's "push-pull theory" of painting: how space, depth and movement can be achieved, on a flat canvas, by juxtaposing color and shape. Although the paintings are distilled, one can see the artist's 80-year preoccupation with manipulating visual elements and creating a dynamic interplay between them, to extraordinary effect.
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: 1945 & 2025 will be on view from June 18 – July 25, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, June 18th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. Please note that the gallery will be closed on June 19th in observation of Juneteenth and on July 4th in observation of Independence Day. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.