Joerg Dressler and Kevin Cyr—August 9 – 22, 2024
Provincetown, MA: The Alden Gallery will present a two-person show of new work by Joerg Dressler and Kevin Cyr, opening on Friday, August 9, 2024, at 423 Commercial St. The artists’ reception will be on Friday, August 9, from 7 to 9 p.m. The show will be on view through August 22.
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 27 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.
Like Dressler, Kevin Cyr has been showing at the Alden Gallery since its opening in 2007. He was trained at MassArt and worked for several years in the studio of Kehinde Wiley. Cyr’s hyper-real oil paintings grew out of his ongoing fascination with the cars and trucks of his childhood in northeast Maine. “I have always been interested in painting vehicles and scenes that have defined the evolution of the American landscape,” he says. Common themes in his work include mobility, sustainability, mortality, and consumer culture. This year he has focused on a familiar obsession: off-road vehicles. He paints them on solid, brightly colored backgrounds, which he likens to a set-up for portraiture.
The Alden Gallery is open daily, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Wednesday through Saturday evenings, 6-9 p.m., through mid-September, 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.
Press contact: Howard Karren, at aldengallery@gmail.com or 646-483-8164.