PAUL RESIKA - Allegory (San Nicola Di Bari)
Recent series of paintings and drawings, fresh from their premiere exhibition at New York Studio School.
GRACE HOPKINS - CONFLUENCE: Abstract-Expressionism Photographs
Paul Resika is about to celebrate his 94th birthday and his audience is invited to journey into a unique new series of paintings premiering in Provincetown directly from his recent inspiring exhibition at The New York Studio School (NYSS) this past winter, Paul Resika: Allegory (San Nicola di Bari). This series was inspired by an obscure engraving made of a panel from an altarpiece predella (ca. 1437) by Fra Angelico on the life of St Nicola di Bari. Ranging from somewhat-faithful reinterpretations to sparse abstractions painted in fantastic colors, some of them eight feet wide, this series offers the range of styles that Resika has made all his own. The first painting was made in 2018, shortly after Resika came across the etching of the predella, and the last one was completed in 2021.
Paul Resika (b. 1928, New York, New York) took up the brush at age nine, studying first with Sol Wilson, then with Hans Hofmann. He followed a circuitous route through the history of art, “seeking the classical foundations of art that I saw buried beneath Hofmann’s own abstract constructions,” said Resika. In the 1950s he started traveling to Europe to study with the old masters, returning to work with the figurative painters Paul Georges and Fairfield Porter in Long Island, New York. The 1960s found him walking the footsteps of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and in the 1980s he began taking on the natural light in Provincetown.
Sue Harrison observed in the Provincetown Banner several years ago: "Resika doesn't like to talk about his art and says most artists can't talk about their own work in a meaningful way. He says he just paints and never knows if it will come out well or not. We observe in this exhibition that Paul Resika is clearly an artist who enjoys all his work and continues to fearlessly stand up in front of the empty canvas." James Panero in The New Criterion noted: "One could say a line runs through all of Resika's work. Just as the Venetian masters did not need to sign their own paintings, since their brushstrokes served as their signatures, Resika has a signature way of handling paint that is entirely his own." Art critic Hilton Kramer wrote "Paul Resika is now without peer in his own generation, a generation that has often made color its most important pictorial interest." Poet John Yau commented, "Paul Resika has been pushing his forms toward the brink of oblivion and finding that edge where dissolution invariably begins.”
Over his eight-decade-long career, Resika has exhibited in prestigious galleries such as Peridot, Graham Modern, and Lori Bookstein Galleries in New York City, and the Berta Walker and Long Point Galleries in Provincetown. Resika joined the Berta Walker Gallery in 1994.
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). A full-color catalog on the NYSS exhibition, published by Bookstein Projects in New York and featuring essays by Christopher Busa and John Yau, will be available.
GRACE HOPKINS, CONFLUENCE: Photographs GRACE HOPKINS, called by Susan Rand Brown in the Provincetown Banner "a photographer with the eye and soul of a painter,” has been creating photographs since 1991. Hopkins is an artist I greatly admire, for her originality, her unique perspective, her courage, for building a highly energized visual image from a tiny piece of reality found in street art and urban textures. Hopkins isolates a fragment of something larger, perhaps a wall, textured and brightly lit, or flickering in shadow. She’s a seeker, motivated to seek out new inspirations in sometimes dark, dangerous, quite barren, unusual areas to find that “note” that will become her discovery. By looking closely at beaten up walls, buildings, boats, she discovers the flicker of renewal, recovering, preserving, and creating anew. When the viewer sees it, it is vibrant, abstract, exciting. When she discovers it, it might be a speck on a blackened wall. Recovery, revitalization, joy and inspiration are the notes the viewer sees and feels.
“Technically,” notes Hopkins, “my photographs are straight images taken of actual things that exist in the world. They are not manipulated in any way. Emotionally, they are all about painting. I search out surface, shadow, light, color, and bring them together onto a canvas. Color is crucial to me. I believe in the power of color and how it affects mood.” Hopkins prints her own photographs in various sizes and on a variety of mediums including board, aluminum, and canvas. This exhibition will include solo images as well as polyptychs.
Susan Rand Brown wrote in the Provincetown Banner: “These images ask that we take nothing for granted. We are jolted into seeing the smallest detail, something we would rush past, as something unexpected, marvelous and, by Hopkins' positioning the camera just close enough to enlarge the image without distortion, something quite grand. Hers is a vision rooted in a pure form of abstract expressionism. The images she shoots suggest the sharply angled details of a Franz Kline, geometric shapes and flat colors of her father [Budd Hopkins] or a sudden burst of translucent layers, which could have been - but definitely are not - details from a collage by Robert Motherwell. Suddenly a viewer feels surrounded by the freshness of expressionist imagery and motion, each piece different, each piece allusive yet quite original.”
Hopkins has been presented in one-person exhibitions in New York, Maine, and across Massachusetts, included in numerous group exhibitions, and has been juried into special exhibitions by such photographers as Joel Meyerowitz and Jeff Rosenheim. She is a teacher, lecturer, college admissions counselor for promising international art students, and frequent panelist. She has been invited to jury several exhibitions, including the “Centerfold Feature” for ArtScope Magazine, and serves on several arts organizations boards.
Paul Resika, Allegory (San Nicola di Bari) #7, 2019 oil on canvas 50 x 62 in
Grace Hopkins, Miami 40 (1/3), 2021color photograph on canvas, mounted 20 x 20 in