Joerg Dressler/ Ed Christie
Alden Gallery Through September 2, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday, August 20, 7-9pm
Pepto Ricky, by Ed Christie, painted resin, 8 x 8 x 7 “
Ed Christie is a veteran puppet designer and builder who worked for more than 30 years on Jim Henson’s Muppets in movies, television, and theater, and, in particular, on Sesame Street, where the characters he designed are seen in productions around the world. In 2008, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum presented a solo exhibit of Christie’s puppets, and his fine-art sculpture has been part of the Alden Gallery since its inception in 2007. For his new show, he has constructed new “Ricky” wall sculptures, part of an ongoing series based on a character he created in 2009, and abstracted sculptures in resin, using dryer lint as pigment for a faux stone effect. “Using contemporary materials and techniques, I’m creating a mash-up of two of my obsessions—classic European sculpture and whimsical character design,” Christie says.
Joerg Dressler Of Good Fortune, Acrylic on linen, 24 x 30”
The work of Joerg Dressler, a founding artist of the Alden Gallery, is driven by nature and how we perceive it. In annual shows in Provincetown over the last 14 years, he has continually challenged himself and his practice, shifting his investigations and renewing his approach. Dressler’s evocative, sensual paintings set up a “tension between lush realism and surface abstraction,” writes Boston Globe art critic Cate McQuaid. His intricate brushwork has “a graphic quality of illustration, per his training as a designer, paired with expressive lyricism” that “evokes a need for control while simultaneously displaying paint’s ability for spontaneous chance,” writes Megan Hinton in Provincetown Arts2021-2022. In his current series, he has juxtaposed still life imagery on landscapes, in a conceptual dialogue with the work of artists of the past. On top of his usual concern for our “nature-appreciation deficit” and our current environmental crisis, Dressler says he has been focused recently on “core feelings, such as love, fear, grief, and gratitude.”
Born in Hanau, Germany, Dressler his lived in the U.S. for the last 25 years, and now splits his time between Provincetown and Miami Beach. He received his MFA from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany, and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France. Dressler is a recipient of the Romanos Rizk Scholarship, and was awarded the Mass Cultural Council 2020 Artist Fellowships Program: Finalist in Painting. His work is in the permanent collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.