Paul Resika: Flowers
June 6 – July 26, 2019
Reception: Thursday, June 6th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

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

Throughout the artist’s illustrious career, he has painted myriad motifs including boathouses, French farmhouses, sailboats, Jamaica, the Provincetown Pier. While he has moved from one subject to another, he has punctuated these themes with a simple still life – a vessel of flowers. Painted between 1986 and  2016, the paintings in this exhibition highlight the importance of this motif to Resika’s oeuvre.  Executed in the same fervent brush strokes and colorful palette as his landscapes and figure paintings, these flowers carry with them the gravitas, dynamism and joy that the viewer has come to expect from a Resika painting. 

Published concurrently by Libellum and Bookstein Projects, Figures of Beach and City: Visits with Paul Resika, features recent poems by Vincent Katz paired with photographs of the artist’s studio and paintings. A poetry reading and conversation between Vincent Katz and Paul Resika will take place on Wednesday, June 12th from 6:00-8:00 PM.

The gallery is also thrilled to announce a forthcoming monograph on the artist to be published by Rizzoli Electa in the Spring of 2020. Edited by Blair Resika, the lavishly illustrated tome will include reproductions of paintings from the 1940s to the present. It will also include scholarly essays by Avis Berman, Jennifer Samet, Karen Wilkin and John Yau. Preorders will be taken in-person at the gallery.

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 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: Flowers will be on view from June 6 – July 26, 2019. A reception will be held on Thursday, June 6th from 6:00-8:00pm. 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.