NYAB Event - Milton Resnick "The Elephant in the Room"

Milton Resnick "The Elephant in the Room"

Cheim & Read

This event has ended.

Born in Bratslav, Ukraine in 1917, Milton Resnick immigrated to the United States with his family in 1922, escaping the civil war of his homeland. In 1933, he left his studies in commercial art at Pratt Institute and transferred to the American Artists School in order to focus on painting; he graduated in 1937. From 1940 -1945, Resnick served in the US Army, returning to New York at the rise of Abstract Expressionism. As part of the first generation of the New York School, Resnick has long been admired as a “painter’s painter,” his thickly layered canvases originating from a purist notion of paint itself.

Upon his death in 2004, Resnick was qualified as the “last Abstract Expressionist painter” (Roberta Smith). Though his later work eclipsed more traditional notions of Abstract Expressionism, he remained fiercely committed to the tenets of non-representational painting. As evidenced in this exhibition, he denied the infiltration of image or illusion, and strived to distill abstraction to its very essence, championing an “all-over” approach to the canvas. As Larratt-Smith argues, Resnick was fundamentally anarchist, refusing hierarchy and authority in painting as well as in life. Contrarian and confrontational, he sustained few friendships, and his attacks on critics and dealers were detrimental to his career. The same intensity was applied to his work; he once described his painting as a “defiant act.” Later paintings are especially indicative of this – the massive, heavily-impastoed, near-monochrome canvases are impenetrably dense, refusing entry or prescribed “meaning.” Yet, in their focus on negation, Resnick’s works acquire a visceral duality. Unyielding surfaces become reflective, almost luminous. For the patient viewer, his paintings are transcendent.