Paul Resika
Maison Basse
1980

Name: Maison Basse
Brand: Paul Resika
Price: 30000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Exhibited: Graham-Shay Gallery One of the last living students of Hans Hoffmann, Paul Resika was destined for fame early on: He had his first solo show at the George Dix Gallery in New York at the tender age of just nineteen, He is associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionist artists in New York City who sought to meld the gestural emphasis and emotional immediacy of the Expressionists with their own representational subject matter. Resika’s work succeeds in seamlessly incorporating the abstract and the figurative within the context of a highly keyed color palette. One critic describes him thusly: "A modernist genre painter, a virtuosic colorist, and a realist painter who traffics in otherworldly moments, Resika has integrated so many idioms of abstraction into figuration that he seems to be giving a middle finger to the art world’s ever-changing avant-gardes." Resika originally studied with the painter Sol Wilson and was permanently influenced by his seascapes. He then went to study with Hoffmann. There, he learned to render the voluminous nature of space and the “push-and-pull” interplay between color and form. “With Hofmann you had to draw forces,” Resika told Ira Goldberg of the Arts Student League, “there were no things. Everything was about relationships.” Auspicious results under Hofmann sent Resika into the rarified orbit of leading painters from the New York scene. Before he turned 20, his Cubist-inflected works were earning Resika exhibition opportunities, notices in the New York Times, and the attention of tastemakers like Clement Greenberg and collectors like Leo Castelli. But despite these early successes, Resika felt he was missing a crucial foundation in anatomy and academic drawing. So in 1950, at a moment when artists around the world were moving to New York to seek out the bright lights of Abstract Expressionism, Resika decamped to Europe. On a parental allowance given in lieu of college tuition, he moved to Paris, then Rome, then finally Venice — to gain his education from the great masters of the western tradition. In Italy, he was galvanized by the Venetian School painters, especially Titian and Tintoretto. Back in America, investigating with bolder color and imprimatur techniques — painting as luminescence — bolstered his belief in the aesthetic value of traditions that had become uncool, like landscape and still life. He went one way and the Abstract Expressionists went another way. Years went by, and wherever Resika went, he painted. His landscapes became progressively more saturated in color, taking them out of the natural, observed world and into the dream-like visions of a Fauvist Arcadia. Still, in the best of these works Resika somehow manages to retain an acute sense of particular light. Yet the fact is, that Resika never left behind the lessons of Hoffmann. His more recent work is an exquisite rendering of relationships, quasi-abstract, geometric shapes and high-pitched color. His work can be found in the collections of the Hecksher Museum, the Met, MOMA, the Whitney and many others.

Creator:

Paul Resika (1928, American)

Creation Year:

1980

Dimensions:

Height: 19.825 in (50.36 cm)Width: 25.825 in (65.6 cm)Depth: 25.825 in (65.6 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

Expressionist

Period:

1980-1989

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Lawrence, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU149729405482

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Paul Resika

Paul Resika (b.1928-) is an abstract figurative and landscape painter whose paintings are meditations on nature. Notable for their geometric forms placed against a mixed palette of high-keyed and subdued color, Resika's paintings create striking oppositions between form, color, and light. Like the paintings of Bonnard, Resika's work encapsulates the hidden power of nature with its color and forms. Resika himself states that he strives to capture "a feeling for nature but without nature." His work blends the figurative with the abstract in such a way that one senses Resika's response to both his physical and interior worlds. Born in New York City, Resika studied with Hans Hofmann in the 1940s and received his first show at age nineteen, at New York's George Dix Gallery in 1948. He was part of what is now considered the second generation of the New York School—artists who applied abstract expressionist techniques, such as the emphasis on gesture and emotional immediacy to the depiction of representational subject matter. During the 1950s, Resika traveled in Europe and began developing the series of recurring pared-down, quasi-abstract motifs: piers and harbors, farmhouses, floral still lifes, female figures. The tradition of French modernist painting, specifically the work of Pierre Bonnard and the French Fauvist painters Matisse and Derain, is strongly evinced in his work. Currently Resika spends winters in New York City, summers i n Provincetown, Massachusetts, and one month each spring in southern France. Each locale and its accompanying season informs his work and plays an important role in his choice of subject matter and palette. Resika was elected to the National Academy Design in 1976 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. He has exhibited both in the United States and abroad. His works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.