Alden Gallery presents: “Mike Wright and Paul Kelly”—July 8 – 21, 2016

Opening on Friday, July 8, 2016, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Provincetown, MA: The Alden Gallery will present “Mike Wright and Paul Kelly,” a show of new work by two remarkable Provincetown artists—their third show together at the Alden Gallery—opening on Friday, July 8, 2016, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the gallery’s exhibit space at423 Commercial St. Drinks and refreshments will be served; the gallery is open to the public and free. The exhibit will be on view through July 21.

Provincetown sculptor Mike Wright, who creates abstract assemblages of found painted wood, is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant winner and has had two major solo exhibitions recently: “Re:Make,” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in 2015 and “From the Sea,” at St. Botolph Club in Boston this spring. For her new show at the Alden, Wright is presenting two new series of interlocking hanging sculptures, “Things in Common” and “Tides.” Says Wright: “The point of using found wood is that, as debris, it seems unpromising. But that lack of promise is also its appeal—the peeling paint, the color scrubbed by salty waves, sand or human use. My principal parameter is that the wood must be found in Provincetown. The second is not to paint that wood, because its patina is impossible to duplicate.”

Local artist Paul Kelly began his “Above It” series of oil paintings based on the bird’s-eye view of Provincetown provided by Google Earth. In his new show at the Alden Gallery, Kelly continues to explore the edges of abstraction in his landscapes, refining color and brushstroke and morphing lines and perspectives. This comes naturally to Kelly, who studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and fine arts at Syracuse University, and set up his studio in Provincetown in the very house and gardens where the legendary Henry Hensche once taught his students. Despite this historical setting, Kelly’s “preference for clean-edged shapes and a muted palette places his art apart from the jewel tones and loose brush strokes of what today is considered the Cape Impressionist tradition,” writes Susan Rand Brown in the Provincetown Banner.