Paul Resika Man Ray Robert De Niro, Sr. Marco Maggi Permanent Photography Space Opening at MFA Boston Label Conscious Artists Recreate the London Underground Logo The Hit Parade

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This concise, 30-year survey of Misrach’s work includes examples from all of this master photographer’s varied series. For those only familiar with the pleasing recent work in Golden Gate (1999), Desert Cantos and On the Beach (2002), earlier projects such as Dead Animals (1987) and Oakland Fire (1991) offer instructive context and depth.

Black-and-white images of cacti and Stonehenge from the 1970s show Misrach’s early tendency toward the taxonomic and documentary. A move to color in the 1980s was also accompanied by a shift from the single-subject focus to an “all over” composition. The Hawaii Portfolio features nighttime shots of the jungle—whose matter-of-factness and dramatic lighting align it more with crime photography rather than tropical tourism.

For the rest of his career, we see Misrach moving back and forth between a discernable subject (a melted tricycle, the Golden Gate bridge) and images fixated on incidental, accidental pattern (tracks on the Utah salt flats; footprints; bathing-suit clad bodies on the sand) as easily as he moves between subjects of gravitas and levity.

The variety of territory covered in this exhibition serves, along with an excellent 280-page monograph, Richard Misrach: Chronologies, to confirm his singular talent.

Hackett-Freedman Gallery
Paul Resika/"Recent Paintings"
Robert De Niro Sr./"Works from the Studio"
March 9-April 29, 2006

Since the 1950s, Paul Resika has been painting “his feeling for nature.” That is, he conjures compositions based on memories of actual scenes, often repeating the same abstracted forms in endless variation.

These particular “Recent Paintings” (selling for between $18,000-$85,000) focus on moonlit boats in harbors and Resika’s simplified shapes, bright colors and painterly gestures anchor endless metaphor and literary allusion. Chromatically, all of Resika’s work is testament to his training with Hans Hoffmann in the 1940s, but their geometry remains arch-modern with the occasional echo of deco.

Naturally, those with more detail, like Newport (1999), seem moored to a specific moment while others, like Moon & Boat (2003-05), are representational only by way of title and series.

Chronologically, we see Resika’s work evolving like jazz improvisations: He begins with specific notations and each subsequent rendition is further abstracted until all that remains are symbols, simple and universal.

Though of a similar genre and generation as Resika, Robert De Niro Sr.’s (1922-1993) still lifes, nudes and interiors are rooted in Post-Impressionism. Like Henri Matisse, De Niro deployed mellifluous, graphic outlines to capture the essence of human figures and objects; color, pattern, and more color fill in detail and emotion.

But brushy strokes and preserved drips in works such as Two Reclining Figures (1968-74) reveal a physical intimacy with the act of painting more aligned with the contemporary Bay Area figurists than with the tight, historical domestic studies of Edouard Vuillard. Several landscapes track De Niro’s progress from painterly gestures (Provincetown Landscape, 1968) to abstract, scrubby color fields in Winfield Street Houses II, Bernal Heights (1978).

But while later works like Three Nudes in Front of a Screen (1983) maintain these semi-scumbled surfaces and looser, descriptive lines, they confirm De Niro’s life-long infatuation with classic subject matter: the figure and the studio. De Niro's paintings are selling for between $85,000-$300,000.

Rena Bransten Gallery
Panayoitis Michael/“I Promise, You will Love Me Forever. Before and After”
Tommy Stockel/“Even Great Futures Will One Day Become Pasts”
March 2-April 8, 2006

Using low-tech materials and processes, Panayoitis Michael and Tommy Støckel’s aggregate works buzz with surreal anxiety.