Provincetown, MA: The Alden Gallery will present a two-person show of new work by Joerg Dressler and Ed Christie, opening on Friday, August 4, 2023, at 423 Commercial St. The artists’ reception will be on opening day, Friday, August 4, from 7 to 9 p.m., with both artists attending. The show will be on view through August 17. 

The work of Joerg Dressler, a founding artist of the Alden Gallery, is driven by nature and how we perceive it. 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, writes Megan Hinton in Provincetown Arts 2021, 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.” In his recent work, he has been juxtaposing still life imagery on landscapes, in a conceptual dialogue with the work of artists of the past. The paintings in the Alden Gallery show this year also feature a sculptural element: Dressler breaks through the surface in organic shapes, revealing underlying panels painted in geometric or op art patterns. The resulting artworks, Dressler says, “are the most personally meaningful I have ever done, arising from memories of the past and impressions of Provincetown in the present.”

Born in Hanau, Germany, Dressler his lived in the U.S. for the last 26 years, splitting 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 Art in New York.

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 especially 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 “Ricky” wall sculptures, part of an ongoing series based on a character he created in 2009. “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.

The Alden Gallery is open daily, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Wednesday through Saturday evenings, 6-9 p.m., through Labor Day, after which it will be open weekends through New Year’s Day, 2024. It is free and open to the public. During gallery hours, call 508-487-4230; off-hours, call 646-483-8164.