Paul Resika: Eight Decades of Painting
In Celebration of the Rizzoli Monograph
September 24 – October 24, 2020

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Paul Resika. This is the artist’s eleventh show with Bookstein Projects.

This past May, Rizzoli Electa published an expansive tome on the career of Paul Resika entitled, Paul Resika: Eight Decades of Painting. Edited by Blair Resika, the lavishly illustrated monograph includes over 220 color reproductions of paintings from the 1940s to the present. It also includes four scholarly essays by Avis Berman, Jennifer Samet, Karen Wilkin and John Yau.

In celebration of this spectacular new monograph, the gallery is delighted to mount an exhibition by the same name. The show will include an example from each decade of the artist’s oeuvre with the earliest painting, Studio (Stars and Easel), dated 1947. The most recent painting, Self-Portrait in the Manner of Tintoretto was painted in 2018 and is hung next to another striking self-portrait of the artist painted some sixty years prior when the artist was only thirty. Taken as a whole, this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see the breadth of the artist’s entire career, which is expanded upon in detail in his new monograph. Discounted copies of Paul Resika: Eight Decades of Painting will be available for purchase at the gallery.

Bookstein Projects is also pleased to announce that the Center for Figurative Painting will mount an exhibition of Paul Resika’s latest body of work this spring. The series, entitled Allegory (San Nicola di Bari), derives from an obscure engraving made of a panel from an altarpiece predella (ca. 1437) by Fra Angelico on the life of St Nicola of Bari. Ranging from somewhat-faithful reinterpretations to sparse abstractions painted in fantastic colors, this series offers a range of styles that Resika has made all his own.  Please check our website for more information on this show in the coming months.

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: Eight Decades of Painting – In Celebration the Rizzoli Monograph will be on view from September 24 – October 24, 2020. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm and by appointment. To make an appointment or for additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.