TWO IMPRESSIVE EXHIBITIONS OPENING AT BERTA WALKER GALLERY
JUNE 24 - JULY 17, 2005
208 Bradford Street • Provincetown • MA
02657
p 508-487-6411 • f 508-487-8794 • bertawalker@bertawalkergallery.com
www.bertawalkergallery.com
GILBERT FRANKLIN
Memorial Sculpture Exhibition
PAUL RESIKA
"On the Edge of the Pond" recent pastels
final weeks, "The Creation Series" Installation
GILBERT FRANKLIN
(1919 2004)
Sculptor, Dedicated Teacher & Professor, Trustee, Overseer, Generous
Supporter of the Arts
MEMORIAL EXHIBITION OF BRONZE SCULPTURE
Berta
Walker Gallery is proud to present a major exhibition
of bronze sculpture by renowned sculptor Gilbert Franklin. The Exhibition
will
open Friday, June 24, with a reception scheduled from 7 9 PM, and
will continue through Sunday, July 17.
This exhibition , the fourth one-man show of Franklin¹s at Berta Walker
Gallery, will include about twenty bronze sculptures -- abstract, figurative
and a combination of both -- ranging in size from 6 inches to 5 feet tall,
and include such varied subjects as bikers, dancers, odalisques, couples and
Greek Gods. A recently discovered collection of special & important small
bronze studies made in the early 1960's for his important sculpture commission
called "Orpheus Ascending", will be featured.
"Touring Gilbert Franklin's studio of finished pieces and wax forms in progress," wrote
Lynn Stanley, "a restrained elegance and simplicity of line were evident
everywhere. The features of each face were nondescript, the forms stylized; one
had the sense of the archetypal body moving in time, not confined to the specifics
of identity."
In a group of recent bronzes described by Andre van der Wende in the Cape Cod
Times as "tender and elegantly refined," Franklin explored the complementary
and dramatic integration of energy and rhythm with a series of dancers, the
figures still and in motion at the same time. The artist catches that dramatic
moment the pause, and the movement, the swirl and whirl of the costume.
The artist's improvisational process, like that of a jazz musician, creates
an intricate harmony. Other works include divas great stage personae in
performance.
The human figure has always been a major source of Inspiration for Franklin. Much of his work has antecedents in the classical sculpture of Greece and Rome -- classical, but expressing a contemporary aesthetic through its often rough surfaces, boldly sliced interacting forms and sharp edges. Franklin has said, "I do basically two types of sculpture: one, figurative both realistic and/or abstracted related to the figure; the other, abstracted forms derived from natural forms found on the Cape like shells and rocks." Franklin primarily worked in bronze, but also had an interest in other mediums. He also had a gift for portraiture. He sculpted many of his friends including Sidney Simon and John Frazier. Describing his work in portraiture, Franklin said in the interview with Lynn Stanley: "In portraits, I don¹t feel constricted to any one approach. Each piece is tied to capturing the character. I see it as a kind of freedom I afforded myself. You don't go into a thing seeking an experience but if you go into the process it becomes an experience." He has always been much more interested in the formal concerns than in the narrative.
Franklin
came to Provincetown in 1938 to study with John Frazier at the old
Hawthorne School. He always said Provincetown wasn't much different
than it is
today "except for the large condos and inns. Commercial Street had two
way-traffic, if you can believe that, and everywhere you went you saw people
painting. It's always been a fascinating place. It think it's a place of
freedom; people can do what they like, mostly, and other people let them
do it."
Gil Franklin was born in England and grew up in Attleboro, MA. His Father was a jeweler and so he was exposed to the tools of working with metals at a very young age. In high school he took an evening course in drawing with an instructor who taught at Rhode Island School of Design and who encouraged him to attend art school. He went to RISD, and continued his studies at the Museo Nacional in Mexico City and the American Academy in Rome.
He has served as Professor of Sculpture, and Chairman and Dean of the Division of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. His most recent awards and commissions include The Ella Jackson Chair at Castle Hill in Truro in 2003 and a fourteen foot sculpture commission in Memory of Rev. Dom Peter Sidler at the Portsmouth Abbey School, Portsmouth, RI; and a major one-man exhibition at Saint Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, NH where he had served as a Trustee for 15 years. He received the Prix de Rome in Sculpture, was a Fellow at the American Academy of Rome, and was named an H.M. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at RISD. He has served as a Trustee of the American Academy in Rome, Augustus Saint Gaudens, and the University of Pennsylvania and as Overseer at Boston University, School of Fine Arts. For the past 15 years , Franklin served as Trustee, co-chairman of the Board and as Chairman and Member of the Visual Arts Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Michael Mazur wrote recently in FAWC's Memorial to Franklin: "His steady leadership helped to steer us away from the dangers of debt toward greater securityŠ.Gil was a natural steward, conserver, and conciliatorŠHis work was characterized by a love of form, especially those sensual forms of the human body abstracted to very particular telling curves and volumes. He created the beautiful medal with which FAWC honors distinguished artists and writers whose careers are models of mentoring and generosity. (In other words, people like Gil.)"
During his long and impressive career, Franklin has received many public commissions for his sculpture including pieces for the Hallmark Collection, Kansas City; the Gannett Building, Arlington, VA; the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, DC, the Harry S. Truman Memorial, Independence, MO, and the "Orpheus Ascending" Fountain at the Frazier Memorial in Providence, RI. His outdoor sculpture, "Seaforms", stands at the Wellfleet Public Library. His sculpture can be found in the permanent collections of important Museums across the Country.
PAUL RESIKA
"On the Edge of the Pond", recent pastels; and final weeks, "The Creation Series" Installation
For Resika, pastel is a fluid medium in which he creates a series of ideas often leading to a group of paintings on the same subject. The group of delicate and sensual pastels being exhibited at the Berta Walker Gallery reflect the serenity and intimacy of time spent on a Wellfleet Pond. The subject is a nude, laying by the pond, surrounded by pine trees, and sometimes, a red or blue boat. This is a quiet, intimate, serene place that Resika knows - every line and curve, every color, and the viewer can sense the ease of his gesture. Beneath the mellow tones of color and line, there must be music playing, cicadas singing. The exhibition will include about 20 pastels and 3 large paintings.
These pastels continue the departure from Resika's most familiar subject of the Provincetown pier. They reflect a quiet, intimate, domestic life, made early last summer, when Resika and his wife Blair were at their cabin on Horse Leech Pond in Wellfleet. In the mornings Paul drew. Later, in the afternoon, he went to his studio on High Head and painted large oils on the same motif (which premiered this winter in New York at the Salander O'Reilly Galleries.)
"The Creation Series" by Paul Resika, is an environmental art installation which opened at the Berta Walker Gallery in August, 2004. Since so many people from near and far have expressed an interest in viewing this great and unusual installation, the Gallery has extended the installation to July 17, 2005, so that early summer visitors may enjoy this once in a lifetime installation experience.
Comprised of four grand scale paintings "the Creation Series" invites the viewer to stand or sit in the center of the room, to be in creation, and to create -- spiritually, physically, emotionally. "After viewing these paintings in depth," said Renate Motherwell, "I was sitting in the room with my eyes closed, and I could hear the sounds of these paintings, hear and feel original creation." This is an opportunity to experience the continuing world premiere, appropriately presented in the historic Provincetown Art Colony where Resika has painted for over 25 years.
The collection of four paintings is installed in their own gallery room (creating a sense of being in cathedral of color). In these paintings Resika has entered a new spiritual dimension that invites the viewer into a metaphysical world that can barely be contained within the picture frame. In the words of Berta Walker, "a universe of color, calling out to a boundless space." In this series, Resika continues to dazzle with his uncanny ability to keep pushing the limits of what color can do. Art critic Hilton Kramer has said 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 has commented, "Paul Resika has been pushing his forms toward the brink of oblivion and finding that edge where dissolution invariably begins."
In this monumental series -- the largest, "Blue Creation I", is 96" x 77" -- Resika wields his powerful palette - pure saturated primary colors of red, yellow, blue, into a creation rainbow, where we are suspended in a holographic world of sea, or is it the highest heavens, or our own pre-natal world. Iconic fish (traditionally associated with fertility) move clockwise in a kind of meditative cosmic circle with geometric colored spheres within spheres (cosmic eggs) and triangles within triangles, moving in color ethers of essential yellow, blue, red. "Yellow Creation" is a veritable sun of eternal light. This work is simultaneously of this earth, and not of it, a duality of worlds that reflects Resika¹s influences from Titian to Matisse. For Resika, this series reflects "the beginning of everything, more like sky, the triangle, like God." And the closer we get to Source, it seems, the simpler and paradoxically, more mysterious - life, and Resika¹s painting, become.
Says Walker: "It's a perfect room of great light, spirit, painting, meditation, color, hope, music, poetry, wonderment! A place in which to experience and visualize hope, joy, peace, our beginnings. It is equal to the uplifting moments experienced in the Rothko, Matisse and Nevelson environments."
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. In the 60's, he began building a reputation for his landscape and figurative paintings. 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 the South of France.
Paul Resika
has received numerous grants and awards, including both the Guggenheim
Fellowship, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant.
He was
elected
to the National
Academy of Design in the early 1990¹s. 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-person exhibitions at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, Artists
Choice Museum, the Century Association and Provincetown Art Association and
Museum. He is exhibited continuously throughout the United States and Europe,
was a founding member of Provincetown¹s Long Point Gallery, and has exhibited
with Berta Walker since she founded Graham Modern Gallery in New York over
20 years ago.
A reception takes place on Friday, June 24, 7 - 9 pm.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATON PLEASE CONTACT THE GALLERY.
NEXT EXHIBITION: July 22 - August 7, 2005.
