PRESS RELEASES FOR ALL 2002 SEASON EXHIBITIONS FOLLOW BELOW
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 SIDNEY SIMON |
press releases for all artists follows below
Paul Resika: Figures by the Pond
New Pastels
August 9 - August 25
Opening Reception Friday, August 9, 7- 9 PM
Berta Walker is pleased to announce an exclusive first exhibition
of a new group of pastels by painter Paul Resika - intimate interiors
on a Wellfleet pond. These pastels are a departure from Resika's most
familiar work, the range of subjects poet W. S. Di Piero calls his
"voluptuous motifs" - the distant view of figures on the
beach from High Head, or the minimal curves and lines of fish shack,
pier, and boats in Provincetown harbor, farmhouses in the south of
France; formal still lifes of flowers.
The work reflects a quieter, intimate, domestic life. These pastels
were made over a few weeks in the early summer, when Resika and his
wife Blair are at their cabin on Horse Leech Pond in Wellfleet. In
the mornings, while Blair read, Paul drew. Later, in the afternoon,
he went to his studio on High Head and painted large oils on the same
motif. One of those paintings is included in this exhibition. But
it is pastels, a medium most capable of the rendering the transitory
moments of domestic life, with which he begins. These pastels are
love rendered and rendered lovingly. It is so difficult to speak about
such private feelings; and yet, no viewer can mistake the tone, the
atmosphere of intimacy, and the comfort of two people who know each
other so well. We are shown the house cats and daily still lifes,
the sensual vitality of a small, familiar world. This is a place that
Resika knows - every line and curve, every color, and the viewer can
sense the ease of his gesture. The sense of extroverted vigor and
extraordinary dynamic tension of color, line, and form that inhabits
much of Resika's work has been switched off here. Beneath the mellow
tones of color and line, there must be music playing, cicadas singing.
We've never seen this inside-outside Resika, from interior to exterior,
the porch, the trees and vines beyond, the pond, the path out into
the larger world. Resika has always cared about place, shown us the
places of his attachment, but from a distance. Here, that distance
has been abandoned, and we experience fully both the physical place
and the mysterious, intangible location of a great painter.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. By the 60's, he was again exhibiting
and had begun to build a reputation for his landscapes. 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 southern France.
Paul Resika has received numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, and elected to the National
Academy of Design. 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-man
exhibitions at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College; Graham Modern
Gallery, Joan Washburn Gallery, Century Association, Artists Choice
Museum, Lori Bookstein, and Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York
City; Hackett-Freedman Gallery in San Francisco; Lizan Tops in East
Hampton, NY; Long Point Gallery, Provincetown Art Association and
Museum, and Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown.
NANCY WHORF
Personal Provincetown: Land and Sea
August 25 - September 5
Opening Reception Friday, August 25, 7 - 9PM
Painter Nancy Whorf is known for her vibrant, expansive Provincetown
scenes. Her many views of the town, the narrow streets, the harbor
and boats, snowy walks, hidden gardens, sunsets and storms are a testament
to her love of this storied seaside town where she grew up. Whorf's
philosophy of painting is a reflection of her way of living. The world
goes around, some things change; some things stay the same; community
matters; nature is true.
In some ways, Whorf is creating a kind of visual memoir, for behind
many of the paintings is a memory. Her eye focuses on the place she
knew as a child and young woman - the busy life centered around the
wharves when Provincetown was a vital fishing center. She says the
work is "thoughtful and sentimental." But Whorf doesn’t
ignore the sometimes harsh reality of living by the land and the sea.
These are not just pretty landscapes.
New paintings in this exhibition include workers at the boatyard,
fishermen hauling in the catch of the day, saving the whales. In a
winter deer hunting scene, the viewer senses the chill of hunter in
the snowy woods, his frosted breath, the excitement of the dogs racing
through drifting white powder, and even the panic of the deer. The
extraordinary beauty of Whorf’s work is magnified by the truth
she tells. In her characteristic brusque way, Whorf says, "I
can’t paint a pretty picture. I have to paint the truth I know."
Provincetown is emotional and visual place for Whorf.
In an interview with Suzanne Horoschak, Whorf said:
You feel, as a painter, that you have something to say. You understate
it, overstate it. You have to have a certain philosophy about life
and living and, for me, the wonder of it all. Cornball as this all
may sound, it's marvelous and wonderful -- the seasons, the elements,
and our interplay with them...I'm not making a political statement
because it doesn't make any difference in the scheme of things. A
plant or a storm, those are important, but the rest of it --it's all
a lot of crap along the highway of life. I paint what I feel has magic
to it."
Whorf continues to develop her expressive emotional content and the
narrative element through both subject and technique. Whorf comments,
"I know this town. There's a lot of information there. I think
I'm getting better at saying more with less. I want to simplify, to
suggest. That's what I like about the palette knife. It's easier to
suggest." Over time, Whorf has refined her knife stroke to the
merest twist of line, the touch of color, to express the mood, to
suggest the whole world of Provincetown.The viewer is struck by the
truth of place; but in the end, Whorf's work is really all about the
paint. The rich, saturated color, the flick of the painting knife
- she is a master.
At the age of 14, Nancy Whorf began her formal art study as a folk
artist decorating furniture for Peter Hunt and for twenty years owned
a shop in Wellfleet that sold her painted furniture. Yet, early on
she wanted to explore her own painting more deeply and spent a year
at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Museum School, where she studied
with Karl Zerbe. The influence of Charles Hawthorne can be felt from
her studies with Vollian Rann and her father John Whorf. Since the
late 80's, Whorf has focused exclusively on her painting. Her work
has been exhibited extensively throughout the country and she has
received numerous commissions from public and private organizations
such as Lincoln Park Zoological Society, Tiffany's in Chicago, Abby
Rockefeller, and other private individuals.
SIDNEY SIMON: SCULPTURE
August 9 - August 25
Opening Reception Friday, August 9 7- 9 PM
Berta Walker is pleased to announce an exhibition of
the sculpture of Sidney Simon,
well-known American painter and sculptor, teacher, and Truro neighbor.
This exhibition is the first showing of his work since a memorial
exhibition at Long Point Gallery in 1997. Selected acclaimed works
are included in the exhibition.
The incredible spectrum of Sidney Simon's artistic work reflects a
capacious intellect, an enormous continuum of interests, and a maverick
spirit that kept him discovering new possibilities and producing new
work for the more than sixty-five years he rigorously pursued his
creative vision.
Simon often worked in series, exploring his ideas through to their
incarnation in a new concept. This exhibition includes sculptures
from the acrobat series of the early 60's (the kinetic milieu of circus
performers was long a fascination of Simon); and from the mirror series,
a deeper, provocative consideration of the psychological aspects of
identity and relationship, which Simon began while at the American
Academy in Rome in the late 60's.
In 1978 New York art critic April Kingsley referred to Simon's "restless
mind and open approach to new techniques" as characteristics
fundamental to his creative production, characteristics not often
associated with members of "the academy". Simon was revered
as a generous teacher. In that spirit, he founded the Skowhegan School
of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in1946 with Bill Cummins, Henry
Varnum Poor, and Charles Cutler, believing that an art school governed
by artists would best nourish developing artists by offering an honest,
supportive forum for divergent viewpoints..."a critical shortcoming
the founders observed in the existing art schools and proliferating
art departments in the forties," according to Skowhegan Governor
Bernarda Shahn.
Simon's sculpture often employs a kind of affectionate wit, or whimsical
humor, humor that points to universal human vulnerabilities. Even
in the midst of such serious, unnerving concerns as our shifting individual
identity, we recognize our vanity, and are amused at ourselves. Kingsley
calls it his "tender humanism". His sculptural homage to
his friend and fellow artist Henry Varnum Poor, a man who had a tremendous
influence on him, presents a rotund Poor lying down on a bench.
In her lyrical and intimate essay for the Provincetown Art Association
and Museum extraordinary retrospective of Simon's sculpture in 1995,
writer and critic Eleanor Munro says:
These works are so multitudinous, playful, ornamental, and quixotic
one mixes them up in memory. But the impression lasts, of a restless
intelligence always looking to revise the culture we are all up to
our
necks in, in flashes of original ideation.
Simon used a great variety of materials and methods in his body of
work to create an imaginative, unexpected visual concepts: mirrors,
prisms, paint, printer's typeface, sand, and bronze, wood fiberglass,
stone, iron, gold, plastic, and bonded marble -- often in combination.
He loved wood, loved to work wood, knew it intimately. His wife Renee
Adriance says simply, "he really understood wood." The largest
and most recent piece in this exhibition, Headstand, 1994, awarded
the Thomas R. Proctor Prize by the National Academy of Design, is
of richly worked black walnut.
Beyond his teaching of artists, Simon had a significant impact on
their working life in his role as a governing member of the Sculptors
Guild, as a founder of Artists Equity, and as a member of the City
of New York Art Commission. In World War II, Simon was appointed to
organize other enlisted artists as army war artists. Born in Pittsburgh
in 1917 to immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, Simon went on to
Carnegie Institute at 15, recognized as a gifted artist, then on to
the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Barnes Foundation.
He taught at the Parsons School of Design, the Art Students League,
the Brooklyn Museum School, Columbia University, Cooper Union, the
New York Studio School, New School for Social Research, Sarah Lawrence
College, the Skowhegan School, and at Castle Hill in Truro, MA. Simon
created many commissions and public works, including the Fountain
Sculpture at City Hall Plaza in Philadelphia, and the Fountain Sculpture,
World Wide Plaza, New York. He won many prestigious awards and his
work is included in many collections, both public and private, including
the Century Association of New York; National Academy of Design; American
Embassy, Paris; National Maritime Museum, Sydney, Australia; Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, Smith college Museum of Art; Orlando Museum
of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Provincetown
Art Association and Museum.
For further information and photographs, Please call Berta Walker, 508-487-6411
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Selina Trieff: Recent Work
Selina Trieff has pursued figurative subject matter throughout
her career. Called "an American original" by New York Times
critic John Russell, Trieff generates allusively gripping figurative
compositions, abstract images in oil & gold leaf, richly pensive,
introspective, strangely self-like. The canon of Trieff's work reveals
an entrenched passion for the push/pull technique of painting she first
learned from Hofmann.
Trieff goes back to the same format in her work, but each return is
a very different experience. In this new work animals and figures again
predominate as subject matter, and while her emphasis is always on the
use of paint, the surface of the painting, and the composition, the
pared down sense of abstraction and her use of space, the movement of
color in that space, the figures here have moved into greater focus,
stronger light, in a way that gives them dominance in the relationships
of her composition.
Still, she creates passages of beautiful emptiness on her canvases.
Included in this exhibition are two large figure paintings, 5 x 6',
the three white figures, their presence and pose tense with emotional
relationship, distilled to their essence in rich fields of color. Her
use of color is luminous and jewel-like, bringing to mind medieval stained
glass windows and early Renaissance alter pieces. The gold leaf evokes
the heightened spiritual presence in religious iconography.
The exhibit also includes a series of drawings of animals and figures
in oil and graphite, emphasis on the head. Trieff refers to a group
of these drawings as her "goofy sheep". Especially moving
is the oil painting "Cardinal Crying", a pale weeping figure
in crimson clerical vestments.Trieff's formally arranged figures are
poised in a moment laden with private emotion. Always reserved, they
possess a formality that seems to offer them emotional distance, safety.
Still, they call to the viewer from that distance. The work is the center,
so to speak, the point of meeting in a relationship with the audience,
a three-pronged relationship -- the painter, the figure, and the viewer.
"The figures are guarded, but they are also vulnerable," Trieff
says. Like the artist in the harsh world of earthly experience, they
are archetypal pilgrims wandering, searching for a homeplace.
Born in Brooklyn in 1934, Selina Trieff studied with Hans Hofmann in
New York and Provincetown, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn
College, and Morris Kantor at The Art Students League. Of her early
experience at Brooklyn College the artist has said: "From Reinhardt
and Rothko I learned that art is a philosophical exploration and that
art making involves a mysterious process of self-discovery."
Trieff and painter husband Robert Henry spend summers in Wellfleet and
winters in their native Brooklyn. Both teach in summer programs nearby.
Trieff's work has exhibited across the United States and in Europe,
and is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum, Kalamazoo
Art Institute, Bayonne Jewish Center, Snite Center at Notre Dame, Citibank,
New York Public Library, Best Products, and Provincetown Art Association
and Museum. She is represented in New York by Katarina Rich Perlow Gallery
and the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, in addition to Berta
Walker Gallery in Provincetown. She recently had a one-person show at
the Long Beach Museum of Art in California and received a catalog grant
for that exhibition from the Richard Florsheim Art Foundation.
Carmen Cicero: Figurative Expressionist Painter
paintings, watercolors, pencil drawings
Described in ArtForum as "a painter capable of striking through
to the complex and contradictory sensations at life's core," the
impact of Cicero's painting is in its extraordinary, powerful images.
In these recent watercolors and drawings, Cicero continues to explore
the moon, the car, the fearful man lost in a menacing forest, keenly
observed and colorful butterflies and flowers. Many of the paintings
place symbolic object, nostalgia- laden and icon-like, against a romantic
landscape.
Cicero's images have always touched our deepest and most vulnerable
nerves. Facial expression,the posture of his figures - often extreme
and distorted, high key color, abruptly shifting scale, humor : characteristic
elements taking emotional expression to the limit, whether it be sheer
terror, darkest humor, sublime landscape. The curiously disjunctive
relationship of figure and ground warn the viewer that things are not
necessarily as they seem. Art Critic Gerrit Henry calls Cicero a "social
realist with a moral conscience dedicated only to wonder."
For Cicero, the work is ultimately about aesthetics. His method originates
in a kind of automatism. He begins with drawings-- impulsive, exploratory,
and random -- scribbling, searching until he feels a strong emotion.
"Then he begins to paint," explains Lowery Sims, 20th Century
Art Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote in his catalog essay
for Cicero's 1984 exhibition at the Graham Modern in New York, then
directed by Berta Walker, "and hopes that his subconscious material
will begin to reveal itself out of the meandering framework he has set
up."
Cicero has exhibited nation-wide, and is included in numerous Museum
collections including New York’s Metropolitan, Guggenheim and Brooklyn
Museums; the Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Cornell University,
National Academy of Art, New Jersey State Museum, Mint Museum, Charlotte,
NC, Art Gallery of Toronto, Canada, and at the Provincetown Art Association
and Museum. He was the subject of a major exhibition at PAAM in 1999.
He has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy of
Arts & Letters, Ford Foundation Purchase Prize, and twice, a Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Romolo Del Deo: 3000 WINGS
New Sculpture
"When I was finally able to return to work in my studio in November,I,
like many others, could not pick up where I had left off work on Sept.
10.
I had to address the tragedy in a way that made sense to me."
For Sculptor Romolo Del Deo, who personally witnessed the mass murder
of 3000 people and the destruction of the World Trade Centers on the
bright sunny morning of September 11, nothing will ever be the same.
In his own words, "the intertwined feelings of gratitude for having
survived and guilt for the very same survival, create an internal conflict
that now compels me to attempt to find positive purpose to counterbalance
the horrible
destruction."
Del Deo's sculpture, entitled 3,000 Wings, premiering at Berta Walker
Galleryon July 19, is comprised of four "towers", each created
entirely out of 750 bronze wings and one large, repining wing of monumental
scale. Currently 48" high, Del Deo envisions creating this monument
on a much larger scale, to 24 feet in height. Del Deo has clothed the
bronze towers in his masterful patinas, alternately highlighting and
darkening the wing tips and deep crevasses.
Del Deo's work has always been about transformation. His fragmented
and distressed classical figures, beautiful and elegiac in their brokenness,
are images that examine the bridge between the past and present, between
what lasts and what falls away, what is transformed in the process
of art making, what begins anew. In this new work, the sculptor, acknowledging
the terrible, the heartbreaking, the killing reality of this gruesome
disaster, turns to redemption.
"At first unable to work at all, I finally turned away from the
destruction towards the amazing outpouring of all that's best in the
human spirit
and condition. In my struggle to move through this experience, I reached
for the metaphor of wings."
An intensely moving sculpture, "3,000 Wings" pays tribute
to the 2,937 reported dead and missing, as well as to the unreported
missing homeless that lived in the vast expanses below and around the
towers and subways "whom we all knew and saw frequently in our
daily routines before 9/11." It also pays tribute to the thousands
who without thought for themselves responded to help save others, and
to the untold thousands who continue to help restore "a semblance
of normal life to the chaos". The 3000 wings are, to Del Deo, emblems
of what is good in mankind.
"On that day as I ran downtown to rescue my family, rushing against
the tide of terrified people fleeing the scene and those frozen in place
in disbelief, I was flanked on all sides by others, both public servants
and civilians, all rushing towards the inferno in hopes of helping.
In the days that followed, the way that everyone sacrificed themselves
and aided others has reached legendary status. But on that day, and
the difficult days that followed, what we did for each other, and what
others did for us, was a constant revelation and deeply moving experience.
Without opening up issues of theology, in a very simple and basic sense
very many of us found a form of redemption while confronting the disaster.
Just as we must never forget the Holocaust, we must also never forget
what happened on 9/11, not just for the horror and destruction we were
once again reminded that man is capable of, but also for the great heights
of love and sacrifice to which humanity can rise. "3000 Wings"
is my way of acknowledging that humanity."
Romolo Del Deo, is a native of Provincetown, son of painter Salvatore
Del Deo, and environmentalist & art historian, Josephine Del Deo.
He took his first sculpture course the summer he was 15 at Castle Hill
Center for the Arts in Truro, studying under Joyce Johnson. "As
soon as I picked up the clay, I felt like it was what I was meant to
do," he says. When he was 18, he traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy
where he was able to focus on marble carving and bronze casting as apprentice
to Rin Ginnanini, Professor of Sculpture at Carrara, Italy. He received
a scholarship to pursue sculpture
at Harvard College where he studied for six years under Dimitri Hadzi.
His sculpture has won awards from the National Sculpture Society, International
Sculpture Symposiums in Italy, and the Provincetown Art Association
and Museum. Del Deo is currently working on a 20 foot high commission
for a sculpture park in Newport News, Virginia and has recently been
recognized with an award grant from the New York Foundation for the
Arts. His work is included in many private and public collections, including
the Municipal Artistic Archives in Carrara, Italy, the Museum of Outdoor
Sculpture in Fannano, Italy, and Smith College Museum of Fine Arts in
Northhampton, MA.
Del Deo has exhibited continuously with the Berta Walker Gallery since
it opened thirteen years ago.
For further information and photographs, Please call the Berta Walker
Gallery, 508-487-6411
