Miguel Abreu Gallery

Born in Bratslav, Ukraine in 1917, Resnick immigrated to the United States with his family in 1922. In 1933, he transferred from Pratt, where he studied commercial art, to the American Artists School in order to focus on painting; he graduated in 1937. A first-generation New York School painter, Resnick maintained close friendships with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, among others. While his early work reflected the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, Resnick ultimately eclipsed more traditional notions of the genre. His transition from explicitly Abstract Expressionist modes to the dense and heavily impastoed canvases of his later years resulted in an intensive exploration of paint’s materiality, leading to the dissolution of line and contour into thick “walls of paint.” In the late 1970s and 80s, Resnick realized his artistic project in which AbEx painting is slowed down and subsumed by the stuff of paint itself. Achieving a unique point of equilibrium between gesture and material, his work reached a limit of this quintessential American idiom. Resnick’s allegiance to the physical properties of paint, its viscosity and “actuality,” was in turn predictive of younger painters like Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella, and anticipated artistic movements such as New Materialism today.