SHFAP presents Through The Trees, our third exhibition by the 90 year old New York painter Paul Resika. The exhibition includes approximately a dozen black and white and color etchings made by the artist with master printer Marjorie Van Dyke between 1997 and 1998.

Resika’s printed images in both color and black and white depict a view through the trees from his home on Cape Cod, which looks north-west towards Provincetown. These etchings made in small editions, employ with startling fluency an arabesque of tangled trees. The play between negative and positive space in the motif of an opening through the trees has been used by painters from Theodore Rousseau to Per Kirkeby. The image reverses the polarities of inside and out. Resika is genuinely a Matisse-ian painter. His color etchings evoke early Matisse landscapes from the turn of the last century and the two large paintings recall the stripped down language of Matisse’s paintings from the teens.

Resika studied under Hans Hofmann as a teenager in the late forties 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 more neutral, inspired somewhat by Corot. 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, and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York. Resika works in both New York and Truro, Massachusetts.

His work is in many significant public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He is a member of The National Academy of Design and American Academy of Arts and Letters. This is Resika’s fourth exhibtion at SHFAP after 8+8 in 2013, Empty in 2017 and Geometry and the Sea in 2018.