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UPON RECEIPT 8/14/06
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Gallery.
August 25 – September 10, 2006 Three one-person exhibitions
VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN collage & constructions
PENELOPE JENCKS bronze sculpture
PAUL RESIKA paintings & collaborations with Varujan Boghosian
Reception: Friday, August 25, 7 – 9 pm
VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN
Sculptor, assembler, constructionist, builder, beachcomber, scavenger,
collector, historian, conservator -- Varujan Boghosian is inspired by the past,
by an appreciation of the lives and legacy of myth, of people and objects that
have gone before, and by a love of the images and iconography that last.
He gathers the relics of our common experience, and transforms them into poetic
tributes, homage to the universal limitless creative spirit.
The current exhibition includes ten new collages and five
collaborations created in 2000 with painter Paul
Resika. Talking with Sue Harrison of The Provincetown Banner, Boghosian described his process of
collaborating with his great friend: "I might see something in Resika's
studio that sets me off. There's something there, something visual, that
strikes me. Or I'll see something in my travels that reminds me of
something that Paul's been doing."
Boghosian’s collages are “phrases of a bountiful vision” writes Lee
Siegel, in his introduction to the “Five in Collage” exhibition at New
York’s Lori Bookstein Fine Art Gallery. He continues: “The European
Dadaists and Surrealists, whose influence Boghosian has deftly assimilated,
alluded to the polymorphous nature of the imagination. Boghosian, at the
literal level of material, enacts polymorphousness.
What Boghosian hasn’t assimilated, he has purposefully debunked. Unlike
the arid mental puzzles of Duchamp and Picabia and Magritte, Boghosian’s
alluring bewilderments are puzzles that ride on feeling…Boghosian’s imagined
worlds are wondrously inviting.”
In a poem written for Boghosian, Stanley Kunitz observes:
“In this image of my friend’s
studio,
where curiosity runs the shop, and you
can almost smell the nostalgic dust
settling on the junk of lost mythologies,
the artist himself stays out of view.
…here everything waits to be
renewed.”
Literature, art, history, classical myth, music - all are source for Boghosian's elegant collages and
constructions. Recurring themes include Orpheus & Hermes and “Why Not” from
Louise Bogan’s poem “The Daemon”. One of
his favorites & recurring themes has been punning Duchamp’s
pun, “Rrose Sélavy”, Duchamp’s alter ego. (Duchamp
invented himself a female alter ego, “Rrose Sélavy” (Eros That's Life), who
appeared in his friends' works. Man Ray photographed “Rrose
Sélavy” on several occasions. Under her name,
Duchamp published in 1939 a book of puns and word games.) Boghosian
continues to challenge the viewer with the fundamental riddle of object and
meaning inherent in the assemblage. We are confronted with a
constellation of objects, an image of an antique rose, a phrase of a musical
score, a multi-hued butterfly, found ancient reproductions erased into a
contemporary life; a child’s coloring book image
of a single clown, (titled “Self-Portrait”). Profound in it’s eloquence,
simplicity, joy, the work puts a mask over life’s pains and
lightens through shared laughter. Boghosian’s works pull at our memories and associations,
often evoking lost images from childhood. Fred Licht, Curator, Guggenheim Museum, Venice, wrote: “In
taking a cursory glance at Boghosian’s work, (we) are reinforced in our
confidence. We feel comfortably at home. Fortunately, when
one takes a second and more searching glance and begins to reflect on
Boghosian’s recurring use of (such myths as) the Orpheus myth , one discovers
the artist’s identity with Hermes, the messenger, the thief, the divine guide
who conducts our souls to hidden realms.”
Varujan Boghosian, now eighty, was born in New Britain, Connecticut in
1926. His father emigrated from Armenia and was a cobbler, before going
to work in the Stanley tool works. Boghosian joined the Navy during WWII
and returned home in 1946 to enter the local teachers' training college.
He soon changed his plans and entered the Vesper George School of Art in Boston
where he met his lifelong painter friends Ed Giobbi,
Salvatore Del Deo, and Ray Rizk.
He joined them in Provincetown for the summer of 1948 and has stayed ever
since. In 1953 he received a Fulbright Grant and went to Italy to
study. When he returned, he became a student of Joseph Albers at Yale
School of Art and Architecture.
Boghosian has held teaching positions at the University of Florida,
Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Yale, Brown, and, since 1968, at Dartmouth
College, from which he retired several years ago. He has received awards from
the American Academy in Rome, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the
Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and is a member of the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He has been presented in one-man exhibitions at the Hopkins Center,
Dartmouth College; The Arts Club of Chicago; Marisa Del Re Gallery, New York;
Boston Public Library; DeCordova Museum in Lincoln,
Massachusetts; and the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, among
others. Group exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago; Musee d'Art Moderne
de la ville de Paris; Pratt Manhattan Center Gallery;
The New School Art Gallery, New York; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of
Design, Providence; Yale University, School of Art & Architecture;
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art; Ringling
Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL; and internationally in England, France and
Italy. His work is in the public collections of Brooklyn Museum;
University Art Museum of the University of California Berkeley; Indianapolis
Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art; New York
Public Library; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Provincetown Art
Association and Museum, among many others.
PENELOPE JENCKS
Berta Walker Gallery is thrilled to present Penelope
Jencks’ intimate sculptures following her amazing show
of grand-scale sculpture which recently closed at the Provincetown Art
Association and Museum. Berta Walker
Gallery will premiere
bronze “Dunescapes ” completed
specifically for this exhibition, as well as introduce a collection of earlier
figurative sculptures created by Jencks in the 1990s. These are
small (3”-8”) bronze nudes, intimately grouped at the beach
playing, disrobing, walking, indicating the sense of awe, the vulnerability and
the freedom Penelope Jencks felt as a child.Penelope
Jencks’ is a world renowned sculptor best known for her impressive monumental
scale granite & bronze sculpture commissions of Eleanor Roosevelt and
Robert Frost; she is a working sculptor whose career spans more than forty
years, and has proven to be Provincetown’s sleeper sculptor of the year. Her
impressive exhibition of colossal nine- and ten-foot plaster sculpture figures
at last found a site worthy of their ambitious
scale and keenly observed humanity in the exquisite new galleries of the
PAAM. The show impressed, surprised, and inspired the entire town and
Outer Cape with its beauty, humble realism, courage, perspective, and
intensity. While Jencks has exhibited in New York and Boston, and participated
in several museum exhibitions, and received numerous awards, residencies, and
commissions, this premiere exhibition at Berta Walker Gallery will be her first
“intimate-scale” Gallery show in over twenty years.
The exhibition at PAAM originated at Boston University College of Fine
Arts, School of Visual Arts, traveled to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum,
and is now on view at Swarthmore College in PA. It is accompanied by a
major catalogue with essays by: Wendy Doniger,
Hayden Herrera, and Jonathan Shahn.
Jencks’ sculpture relates to her experiences growing up with a family
of intellectuals and artists who shed their clothing at the beach. “Not that
they “flaunted” their nudity,” she says, rather, ”they were simply more
comfortable. We would walk far enough up the beach so as not to
offend. My parents and their friends considered
it more “natural” to swim or lie around on the beach without any clothes to
hinder them. So once out of sight, they would shed their clothing
and carry on with their intellectual wranglings about
Beauty & Truth.”
Continuing, Jencks says, “I remember noticing as a tiny child how odd
and different these monumental bodies were from
my own more streamlined, tidy version. As a child, the beach was a magical
place to me. We spent the summers in Wellfleet. The shape of the
land, with its curves and dips, were like the forms of a large human
body. As children, it was as though we lived on a big shapely body
that we could walk on, dig in, and pick flowers from. The sea the
sky and the dunes were our constants.”
Art historian & critic Hayden Herrera grew up with Jencks, and
wrote about their youth on the Cape: “A group of Cape Cod families had
frequent beach gatherings at which the adults wore no clothes. For the
children, the anticipation of these events was exciting: because our
parents were busy with writing, painting, or composing music, most of the time
we were left to our own devices…Privacy, creativity and individualism were the
order of the day…Over the years, the young people became like a tribe. We
knew a lot about each other, but very little about that other tribe, the
grownups – except what they looked like naked, which we did not want to know.“
Describing the small bronze sculpture groupings, Wendy Doniger writes: “The figures are tinier even than
those small bronzes she has made all along as models for the colossal
figures…these figures, by contrast with earlier beach series and the large
bronze groups, really are together, in close human contact: the woman is
caught as she falls, the pair of swimmers are holding hands, the man is asking
the woman an ‘Unanswered Question’ (a reference to a piece by Charles Ives).”
Jonathan Shahn noted: “This prolific and
powerful artist has a long experience and great mastery in using fired clay and
bronze in numerous large-scale, even monumental, works, yet is also able to use
the same materials in a most intimate and sensitive way,”
Penelope Jencks started her studies in art history at Swarthmore
College. “But,” she reveals to Ann Wood in The Provincetown Banner, “I decided I would rather make art than
study it”. Between her Swarthmore years, Jencks studied with Hans
Hofmann, then continued her artistic pursuits at
Skowhegan, Boston University (BFA), Boston Museum School and Stuttgart Kunst Akademie.
Fellowships
and awards include: Agop Agopoff
Prize for Sculpture (2005) and Meisner Prize for
Sculpture (2001), both from the National Academy of Design; Distinguished
Alumni Award, School of Visual Arts, Boston University; Henry Hering Memorial Medal and Prize for Outstanding Cooperation
between Architect & Sculptor, National Sculpture Society; MacDowell Colony Residencies in ’75, ’76, ’78;
“Commendation for Design Excellence,” NEA; Massachusetts Artists Foundation
Award, Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Centro Studi Ligure.
Jencks has received many major sculpture commissions including: “Robert
Frost” for Amherst College; “Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial”, Riverside Park, NYC;
“Family Group”, Readers Digest, “Danbury Family”, Art in Public Spaces at the
Courthouse, Danbury, CT; ”Student”, Farber Library, Brandeis University;
“Family”, Portside Festival Park, Toledo, OH; “Samuel Eliot Morison,”
Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA; “Chelsea Conversation”, Chelsea, MA.
PAUL RESIKA
“Paul Resika’s
brushstroke is calligraphic, his rendering of landscape almost sexually ripe and
his color both pragmatically local and hallucinatory.” Stephen Westfall, Art
in America.
The
work represented in this exhibition at Berta Walker Gallery will be a variety
of paintings representing three different motifs: the Provincetown boat
motif -- profiles of boats resting on a tranquil sea; large-scale
paintings of nude women emerging from the sea surrounded by jumping
fish, or, sensually seated by the sea with a cat; and the intimate
paintings reflecting the quieter, personal life shared by Resika and his wife,
singer & photographer Blair Resika, at their summer cabin in
Wellfleet. Some are reclining and/or seated female figures, some reading, some
not; some nude, some in wraps, and usually
placed in the priority position of the lower left of the canvas.
Writing
about these intimate Wellfleet paintings, Hilton Kramer in The New York Observer,stated:
"I do not hesitate in saying that
(Resika’s) current show tops everything I’ve seen by this remarkable
painter. A triumphant achievement...These
are the richest, most complex paintings Mr. Resika has given
us…for
they command in uniting so many of the
pictorial conventions that have been central to the aesthetics
of modernist painting…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."
And John Yau, writing in the introduction for the
catalogue of these paintings says: “the painting is both accessible
and mysterious, absolutely vivid and remote. However close to the edge
the woman is placed, she seems to exist in a world altogether separate from
ours. It is this quietly disturbing duality, this sense that the world
Resika depicts is both immediate and distant, that gives the paintings their
emotional tone.”
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 as an artist and teacher himself,” wrote Cate McQuaid in the Boston Globe, “His show at
Berta Walker Gallery leaves 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 Lazzell, 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. 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 mostly high on a dune overlooking
Pilgrim Lake, and for a month each summer, on Horse Leech Pond in Wellfleet.
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, 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. In recent years
he has received major exhibitions in Rome and Barcelona. He was a
founding member of Provincetown’s Long Point Gallery, and has exhibited with
Berta Walker since she was hired by Robert Graham, Sr. to found Graham Modern
Gallery in New York almost 25 years ago.
NEXT
EXHIBITIONS: SEPTEMBER 15 - OCTOBER 8. ANNE MAC ADAM, "The Dunes in Winter"; ROSS MOFFETT, paintings and works on
paper; DIPTYCHS, TRIPTYCHS, and
POLIPTYCHS, gallery group exhibition.