208 Bradford Street Provincetown MA 02657
p 508-487-6411 f 508-487-8794
bertawalker@bertawalkergallery.com
www.bertawalkergallery.com
July 24, 2008
Opening Friday, August 1 - 17, 2008
Berta Walker Gallery presents three masters
VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN constructions
PENELOPE JENCKS bronze & terra cotta sculptures
PAUL RESIKA paintings
FOR PHOTOS PLEASE GO TO OUR MEDIA WEBSITE
bertawalkergallery.com/media
and click on image to download 300 dpi TIFF files, or please contact Sky Power, Managing Director of the Gallery 508 487-6411
Varujan Boghosian talks of his new constructions as an artistic breakthrough. After over 50 years, it is the culmination of all sorts of things. A new look enters into it. A door opens. Something different happens that never happened before.
Paul Resika says, with an ironic laugh: I've made seven paintings of lighthouses a brand new motif of Cape Cod.
Penelope Jencks points to her work from the tiniest to a 7-foot giant as all being larger than life, as in the perspective of a young child to an adult. These nudes are, to me, like a mountain or tree on earth's landscape.
VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN
Varujan Boghosian's career has spanned over fifty years. In the past six months he has experienced an artistic breakthrough. It is the culmination of all sorts of things. A new look enters into it. A door opens. Something different happens that never happened before. You pause to wonder. Boghosian began his career in watercolors and by the early 1960s had begun making constructions and collages. His work is influenced by artistic, literary and mythological sources, but the combinations are pure Boghosian. A new piece presents a detailed beadwork image of a figure from the Renaissance. Rather than a face, however, we are presented with the rear of a metal mannequins head of flowing hair. The title isAfrica. The suggestions are multiple and jarring. The Roman god Janus looks both to the future and the past. The continent itself seems caught somewhere in between its own past and the future. And dont we all live somewhere between moving forward and looking back? That is the latest inspiration of the artist, the refinement of a sensibility down to the most subtle suggestions. Two elements, Boghosian says, referring to the piece. Thats a killer. His studio is like an archive of found objects from every aspect of life. He combines the everyday, the mundane. He turns the expected on its head. We are caught unawares and suddenly our assumptions are put into question. We are forced to think. That is the genius of Boghosian, luring us in with curiosity and compelling us to wonder through his varied associations.
Boghosian has held teaching positions at the University of Florida, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Yale University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College. He has received awards from the American Academy in Rome, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He has exhibited in individual shows at the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, The Arts Club of Chicago, Marisa Del Re Gallery, New York City, the Boston Public Library, DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Long Point Gallery, Provincetown, and the Fine Arts Work Center, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Mus'dArt Moderne de la ville de Paris, Pratt Manhattan Center Gallery, the New School Art Gallery, New York City, the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Yale University School of Art & Architecture, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, as well as in England, France and Italy. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, among many others. Several catalogs and articles have been published about Mr. Boghosian.
PENELOPE JENCKS
Penelope Jencks is a world-renowned sculptor known over the years for her monumental commissioned granite sculptures of such important individuals as Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Frost. But she kept her studio work primarily to herself, exhibiting infrequently. Two years ago she came out with her phenomenal life-sized and miniature nude sculptures in a major traveling retrospective exhibition, wowing audiences and critics alike.
Included in the current exhibition at Berta Walker Gallery will include a bronze table with five 20 nudes in varying stages of dressing and undressing as well as a second table -- a plaster which will eventually serve to create a new bronze sculpture -- two large sculptures, also naked and preparing. Additionally, the exhibition will include miniature terra cotta sculptures of peopled dunes, relating the human form to natures dune forms. At any size, Jencks people appear larger than life. And indeed, even her tiniest bronzes and terracottas, relate the feeling to the viewer of larger than life. Says Jencks, My nudes are not naked or nude, they are who they are. Nude implies a state of exposure, a want, perhaps to cover oneself. These sculptures are about being who they are and have no interested in covering up. They are natural, huge, like a mountain or tree.
Following the grand success of Jencks traveling Museum exhibition, she was awarded 2nd prize for "Best Monographic Show in an Institutional/ University Gallery, Boston Area, from the New England chapter of AICA Association Internationale des Critiques d'art, the International Association of Art Critics." Most recently, she was invited to participte in an exhibition at New Yorks National Academy.
Jencks large public commissions, include sculptures of Robert Frost at Amherst College, Eleanor Roosevelt in Riverside Park, New York City, Family Group at the Readers Digest Corporation in Pleasantville, New York, the Danbury Family at the Danbury, Connecticut Courthouse, and Samuel Eliot Morrison on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston among many others. Her works are in the collections of the White House, the National Academy of Design, the Boston Public Library, the Bibliotecca di Pietrasanta, Italy, the City of New York, the City of Boston, the Cape Museum of Fine Arts and the City of Toledo, Ohio, among others. She has had solo shows at Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Boston University 808 Gallery, List Gallery Museum at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore Pennsylvania, the Cape Museum of Fine Arts, Concord High School, the Helen Schlein Gallery, Boston, Landmark Gallery, New York City, the Art Institute of Boston, and the Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Massachusetts. A major catalogue on Ms. Jencks work was published byBoston University.
PAUL RESIKA
Paul Resika can't resist being a little ironic about his latest paintings. My new work includes seven paintings of lighthouses. A brand new motif of Cape Cod, he says with a laugh. But Resika's lighthouses are not your average Cape Cod lighthouse. They are geometric structures, almost two-dimensional, placed in fields of Resika's vivid blue paired with a full moon of deep orange. They are set in billowing cloudscapes that open for that moon, connecting the lighthouse with the night sky. Or the lighthouse is a stark black and white structure set against an amber-colored sky with a bright yellow moon. They are at once primitive and monumental. They have a sense of isolation, of simultaneous guide and sentinel. Resika recently rediscovered lighthouse drawings he had done over sixty years ago. They inspired him. I was working on some big pictures I couldnt solve and then I put the lighthouse in the corner and it started to work. Resikas lighthouses may be a return to the past, but his work continues to push forward. His coloration is deep and intense. And the lighthouses assume that primordial characteristic that has always guided seekers in the dark.
Resika studied with Sol Wilson at a young age and at 17 was working with Hans Hofmann. By the age of 19, he showed at the George Dix Gallery in New York City. Resika has been featured in England, France, Italy and throughtout the United States and was presented in solo Museum shows at Artists Choice Museum, NYC and Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. Galleries have included Berta Walker Gallery and Longpoint Galleries in Provincetown; Graham Modern Gallery, Joan Washburn Gallery, Century Association, Lori Bookstein and Salander-OReilly Gallery in New York City; the Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco; and Lizan Tops in East Hampton, New York. He hasreceived many grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the National Academy of Design. His work is in the collections of Chase Manhattan Bank, Dartmouth College, Willem de Kooning, Exxon Corporation, the Joseph Hirshhorn Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, Sara Roby Foundation, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Several catalogs are available published on Paul Resika.