FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 7.28.03

Friday, August 8 – Sunday, August 24, 2003

Opening Reception FRIDAY, August 8, 7- 9 PM

Paul Resika:  Paintings and Drawings

Brett Walker Gallery will unveil for the Cape audience a selection of five paintings from the highly acclaimed new work of painter Paul Resika. Of the paintings from this series recently introduced in his New York exhibition at Salander O’Reilly Gallery, Hilton Kramer of “The New York Observer” wrote:

I do not hesitate in saying that (Resika’s) current show tops

everything I've seen by this remarkable painter.  It's a triumphant

achievement not to be missed by anyone with a keen interest in

the art of painting…He is now without peer in his own generation.

The mastery Paul Resika has assimilated over his long career is in full, triumphant flower, and serves at the birth of a robust and incandescently brilliant new phase in the work of the painter.

For here the painter has brought together many of the pictorial motifs that have been central to modernist painting, arranged in inspired juxtaposition in what Hilton Kramer calls a "virtuosic performance of the painter's art,"  He has set them in their places, floating in a pulsating field of color, charged with a "subtle but irreducible tension," according to poet and critic John Yau, "the inescapable sense that a serene world is on the brink of dissolving, like a dream from which we have just awakened."   Yau continues,

            "Like a reverie, the painting is accessible and mysterious, absolutely vivid

 and remote....it is this sense that the world Resika depicts is both immediate

 and distant that gives the paintings their emotional tone.  We are able to witness

 a world we can't enter.  We are possessed by a dream.  And in this dream,

 everything is familiar, but nothing is quite what it seems."

Paul Resika was born in New York City in 1928.  He began taking painting lessons as early as nine, greatly encouraged by his Russian émigré mother, and studied with Sol Wilson when he was 12 years old.  In his late teens, he studied for two years with Hans Hofmann.  He was early influenced by the paintings of Joseph De Martini.  At 19, the young Resika had his first one-man show of paintings at the George Dix Gallery on Madison Avenue.  For much of his 20's Resika traveled in Europe, settling in Venice for two years, studying independently the Venetian painters.  He returned to the US in 1954.  In 1958, he began to paint outdoors and has not stopped since.  By the 60's, he was again exhibiting and had begun to build a reputation for his landscapes.  Since 1964, Resika has spent winters in New York and summers on the Cape, where he lives high on a dune overlooking Pilgrim Lake.  He spends early summer on Horse Leech Pond in Wellfleet and a month each spring painting in southern France. 

Paul Resika has received numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, and elected to the National Academy of Design.  His work has been collected by major museums across the country including the Metropolitan Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, and the Sara Roby foundation Collection, to name a few.  He has had one-man exhibitions at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College; Graham Modern Gallery, Joan Washburn Gallery, Century Association, Artists Choice Museum, Lori Bookstein, and Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York City; Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco; Lizan Tops in East Hampton, NY; Long Point Gallery, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown.

For further information and photographs, Please call Berta Walker, 508-487-6411

Next Exhibition:  August 29 - September 14:  Gallery Artists:  Surprises and More!