Gouache and watercolor on cream wove paper, 1960. 960x1265 mm; 38x50 inches. Signed and dated in gouache, lower left recto.
Provenance: Gifted by the artist to private collection, New York; thence by descent to current owner, private collection, New York.
Resnick (1917-2004) trained at the Pratt Institute, New York, where he studied commercial art, before transferring to the American Artists School to focus on painting. Among the first generation of the New York School artists, he associated with early Abstract Expressionists such as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Resnick sought to dissolve form and image, employing the sculptural elements of the paint. He eclipsed the traditional modes of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1940s and created dense and heavily impastoed paintings that sometimes weighed more than several hundred pounds. His foray into the materiality of paint was predictive of artists such as Cy Twombly and Frank Stella who focused on process and an "all-over" approach to developing a canvas. Resnick completed a number of large-scale, expressive gouache paintings on paper around 1960 (another similar work was offered at Sotheby's, New York, March 9, 2012, lot 170), while exhibiting with the Howard Wise Gallery, New York.
