BERTA WALKER GALLERY
208 Bradford Street • Provincetown • MA 02657
p 508-487-6411 • f 508-487-8794 • bertawalker@bertawalkergallery.com
www.bertawalkergallery.com

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or, please contact Sky Power, Managing Director of the Gallery

FOR RELEASE: UPON RECEIPT
7/31/07

August 10 – August 26,
VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN, DIMITRI HADZI, PAUL RESIKA
LYRICISM IN PAINT, BRONZE, FOUND OBJECTS
and
Provincetown Masters on Paper

Reception: Friday, August 10, 7 - 9 pm.

VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN
Collage and Constructions
Working with found materials, Varujan Boghosian creates constructions and collages through the use of old and discarded objects and paper. In the resulting elegant, poetic works, we find that the old and ordinary has been endowed with wonder and mystery, wit and pathos. Boghosian uses his carefully culled raw materials to create works of pure and lyric visual poetry, “Haiku in found objects,” says Berta Walker. Though in a different medium, they remind one of the still lifes of Morandi or the exquisite quiet aesthetic of Asian vessels. Boghosian is inspired by a love for the past -- particularly a fascination with classical myths, which he retells through the materials of American life with deceptively simple artistry.
Boghosian is an avid and discerning collector of the old -- ancient paper, wooden boxes, children’s toys, books, shoes, bits of furniture -- which he transforms by creating a new context for them, revealing an inner spirit and inventing poetic worlds in which objects speak to each other and to the viewer. “For Boghosian, the creative act is a process of reclamation and re-attribution. Real things are scavenged, stored in the studio, and then sent back, trans-formed, to the world outside. By dislocating and repositioning, Boghosian is able to explore the nature of identity and to create new syntheses and new conditions of meaning from items which have seemingly been drained of the possibility of ever transmitting new values or ideas.” (Robert M. Doty, The Hood Museum)
Currently, Boghosian has been looking for old horseshoes, with the nails still in them (see his construction “Lucky U”), and he continues to seek out ancient wallpaper & coloring books. Stating in
a recent interview with Brian Goslow of Artscope Magazine, “The artistic element is the teller of time. The disfiguration of the colors can’t be done on a new object and the designs are sometimes so outrageous.” Goslow continues: “In vast contrast to Joseph Cornell, who packed a lifetime of pieces into a composition, Boghosian uses only a few artifacts. “’It’s almost a type of boasting if I can do something with two or three pieces and find an image I’m happy with,’” says Boghosian. “’It’s a terrific kind of subtraction that’s like a woodcarver who starts with a huge piece of wood and whittles away and whittles away till it’s a skeletal sculpture.’”
Boghosian was born in the United States in 1926, the son of an Armenian cobbler. After serving in the Navy in WW II, he entered Vesper George School of Art in Boston, and by 1953 had received a prestigious Fulbright Grant for art to study in Italy. Boghosian studied at the Yale School of Art with Joseph Albers, and was twice artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. He has held teaching positions at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Yale and Brown, and for the past 30 years, taught at Dartmouth College. His art is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His captivating art was launched in New York by the prestigious gallery Cordier Ekstrom and continues to be shown in galleries and museum throughout the United States. He has been showing with the Berta Walker Gallery for fifteen years.
This is a special show for Boghosian who is always enthusiastic about exhibiting with his old friends, the painter Paul Resika and the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, who died last year. "There has always been a lyricism about the three of us together."

DIMITRI HADZI
(1921-2006)
bronze sculpture
Dimitri Hadzi will be presented in his first Gallery exhibition since his death in April of 2006. His sculpture is being presented with the art of his two great friends, Paul Resika and Varujan Boghosian. As Boghosian once stated: "There has always been a lyricism about the three of us exhibiting together." Resika said in a recent article in Art New England, “Hadzi was a generous friend and teacher. He was an exemplar of the totally committed artist.”
Known for his abstracted and simplified figures, Hadzi’s sculpture is also readily identified for its unique "articulated" textured surfaces evolved over his fifty-year career. These bronze surfaces, laboriously finished and patinated by the sculptor, have been described by Harry Cooper, Curator of Modern Art at the Harvard University Arts Museums as “bearing the traces of knife and trowel, the memory of scraped wax and spattered plaster applied and articulated by a sure, never fussy hand...they are also ‘articulate’ in that they make light speak.”
In Provincetown Arts, Hadzi was quoted as equating the basic feeling in his work to geological phenomena: “It is not unlike the layering of sediment deposits--the metamorphic phases where those sediments (experience) are compressed by time (contemplation) and action to convert or transform (crystallize) ideas into new images. Then, of course, the igneous or volcanic, the violent upheavals or the internal pressures that completely and dramatically alter and transfix concepts into solid reality.”
Born in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1921, Hadzi lived and worked in Rome, the "Eternal City," for twenty-five years. From these two very rich sources comes the dual strength of Hadzi’s art that draws on a sculptural tradition going back to the ancients while deftly balancing abstract and figurative impulses.
Growing up during the Depression, Hadzi’s Greek immigrant parents thought chemistry, not art, a "real" profession. So chemistry is what he studied -- for a brief moment. Hadzi, always driven to create, took the entrance exam to Cooper Union. He passed, dropped chemistry, and was on his way. Graduating with honors from Cooper Union in 1950, Hadzi was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the study of stone sculpture in Greece, where he first met his mentor, Henry Moore. After traveling to Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, Hadzi went to Rome. He once described the experience “Everyone was there -- Fellini, Afro, Carlo Levi, Mirko. It was the collecting place of movie stars and it was just one big intellectual circle. Over time, I met everyone.”
Hadzi returned to the United States in 1975 to teach at Harvard where he remained affiliated until he retired in 1989. Both Paul Resika and Romolo Del Deo refer to Hadzi’s great generosity in encouraging his students. Romolo Del Deo, later a studio assistant of Hadzi’s at Harvard (and also an exhibiting artist of the Berta Walker Gallery), said in Art New England: “Hadzi encouraged his students to study their mistakes or their damaged sculptures, for ‘the grain of new thinking that lay in the apparent disasters.”
In 1962, Hadzi was selected, along with Louise Nevelson, to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. He received major commissions throughout his career, including the ecumenical bronze doors for St. Paul’s Within-the-Walls in Rome; The Hunt, installed at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, in 1966; Thermopylae, the 16-foot-tall sculpture we all know in Boston’s Government Center, commissioned by Walter Gropius for the John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building; Omphalos at Harvard Square; the 60-foot-high mixed-stone fountain at Copley Place, and Elmo at MIT.
Other awards and grants include the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, St. Gaudens Award, and he was an elected Fellow in both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a continuing member of The Signet Society, Harvard University, and the National Academy.
Hadzi is represented in the permanent collections of virtually every major Museum in the United States including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Guggenheim Museum. Receiving over twenty sculpture commissions, Hadzi’s work appears in public squares, concert halls, office buildings and universities all over the world.

PAUL RESIKA
New paintings
  The work represented in this exhibition at Berta Walker Gallery features the recent paintings completed by Resika after a two-week stay last summer in the NW of Maine by Lobster Lake. They were inspired by the grand scale and angularity of Maine rocks and mountains in contrast to the calming waters of Lobster Lake. Resika paints this environment with the lush brushwork and rich color for which Resika is so well known. Resika's engaging colors and simple forms will both comfort and excite the viewer. As Hilton Kramer in The New York Observer, stated, “As a colorist – a painter who draws in color with a loaded brush – he is now without peer in his own generation, a generation that has often made color its most important pictorial interest." Mark Strand wrote of Paul Resika’s new work in the catalog for his Salander-O’’Reilly show:

"The simplicity that characterizes Paul Resika's paintings is deceptive. What appears to be casual disposition of landscape elements is in fact the delicate and precarious articulation of a vision of pictorial purity. In looking at Resika's work, one senses two things simultaneously: that nature despite its complexity has been partially transformed into an idealized place of circles, half-circles, triangles, and straight lines, and that the feel of the out-of-doors---the depth of sky, the outline of island or distant mountain, the sun, the moon---is palpable and has not been compromised."

As a young student of nineteen, Resika, now in his mid-seventies, arrived in Provincetown in 1947 to study with legendary art teacher Hans Hofmann.  Resika has since “…grown into something of a legend himself as an artist and teacher,” wrote Cate McQuaid in the Boston Globe. “His show(s) at Berta Walker Gallery leave no doubt as to the power of his painting…The saturated colors, the simple, graceful forms – in a sense this is nothing new; artists have been painting at this edge of abstraction for a century-- yet Resika’s work has such clarity and power, it seems new.”
Resika rarely talks about his own work, but in conversation with Sue Harrison of The Provincetown Banner, he said:  “Form has been my occupation, maybe too much. It’s not the subject, it’s form.  I’d like to be different, to change, but you have to follow your form and hope it leads to good things.   It’s a high art, painting, and there are a lot of people behind us.  We’re standing on a lot, a lot of people.  In Provincetown, my god, there’s Webster, Chaffee, Blanche Lizella, Karl Knaths, Hans Hofmann – my teacher – and all these romantic painters.”
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. 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, independently studying the Venetian painters.  He returned to the US in 1954. In 1958, he began to paint outdoors and has not stopped since. Since 1964, Resika has spent winters in New York and summers on the Cape, where he lives mostly high on a dune overlooking Pilgrim Lake. He and his wife, the photographer and singer Blair Resika, also spend time on Horse Leech Pond in Wellfleet and Lobster Lake, Maine, both great sources for their art.
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 1990s. His work has been collected by major museums across the country including the Metropolitan Museum, Hirschhorn 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. In recent years he has received major exhibitions in Rome and Barcelona. Resika was a founding member of Provincetown’s Long Point Gallery, and has exhibited with Berta Walker both at Graham Modern, NYC, and in Provincetown for over 20 years.

Provincetown Masters
A group exhibition of Provincetown Masters will occupy the large rear gallery.
Included will be Oliver Chaffee, Karl Knaths,Charles Hawthorne, Blanche Lazzell, Ross Moffett, Agnes Weinrich

FUTURE EXHIBITIONS

AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 16
*Inspirations 2007 gallery artists
*Provincetown Masters continues

No opening reception
Gallery Hours, daily, 11-6, closed Tuesdays

SEPTEMBER 21 – OCTOBER 14
*Provincetown Generations in the Arts, Series 2
The Mailer Family: Norman Mailer, Norris Mailer, Danielle Mailer, Maggie Mailer
*Greetings of the Season: Gallery artists

Reception, September 21, 7 – 9 pm
Gallery Hours: daily, 11-4, weekends, 11 – 6, closed Tuesdays