Paul Resika
The Sound of the Shell
2014

Name: The Sound of the Shell
Brand: Paul Resika
Price: 22000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Paul Resika was born in New York City in 1928. He began taking painting lessons at age nine, greatly encouraged by his Russian émigré mother. At twelve years old, he began studying with Sol Wilson. In his teenage years, he studied in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann’s monitor: a significant honor for a young artist. He had his first exhibition at the George Dix Gallery in New York City at nineteen years old. He later traveled and studied in Venice, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. Resika’s outstanding work in oils earned him a reputation for his landscape and figurative paintings and is celebrated for his bold mastery of color, as evidenced by this playful oil painting. This smaller work is an example of other Resika trademarks, as well: geometric shapes collapsing alternately collapsing on and supporting one another; negative space as a composition element; and layered color.

Creator:

Paul Resika (1928, American)

Creation Year:

2014

Dimensions:

Height: 16 in (40.64 cm)Width: 20 in (50.8 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

Abstract Impressionist

Period:

21st Century

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Provincetown, MA

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU2511212428142

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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.