Milton Resnick: 1937-1987

The opening exhibition of The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation will be a fifty-year retrospective survey, Milton Resnick Paintings 1937-1987. The exhibition, curated by Geoffrey Dorfman, traces the artist’s transition from his early, inventive Abstract Expressionist works, to the dense allover canvases of his maturity for which he is best known. Resnick’s thickly impastoed works, sometimes of immense proportions, reflect a faith in the evocative powers of paint itself.

Drawn largely from the Foundation’s collection, the exhibition will also include loans from private and museum collections, including rarely-seen works from the 1940s and 50s. Additional works, such as the monumental and seminal New Bride (1963) from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will be added to exhibition in fall 2018, and remain at the Foundation on extended loan.

The exhibition will be presented on three floors of the converted synagogue, on the lower east side of New York, that served as Resnick’s studio from 1976 until his death in 2004. The artist’s final studio, a closet-size room where he painted exclusively on paper in the last years of his life, is meticulously preserved and on view on the third floor.

The exhibition catalogue, Milton Resnick Paintings 1937-1987, now available, reproduces more than forty of Resnick’s paintings and will effectively be the only monograph on the artist currently in print. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Pat Passlof.