albert kresch
At age 9, Albert Kresch (1922–) moved with his family from Scranton, Pennsylvania to Brooklyn, New York, his primary residence since the 1930s. Now at 100, he paints daily in his Brooklyn studio. Kresch studied figure drawing informally at the Brooklyn Museum but soon embarked on more serious training at the Hans Hofmann School. Among his peers were Paul Resika, Leland Bell, Louisa Mattiasdottir, Nell Blaine, Judith Rothschild, and Robert De Niro, Sr.
Kresch was one of the original members of the Jane Street Gallery (1943–1949), New York’s first cooperative gallery. Like him, most of his fellow members were former Hofmann students. Kresch’s first two shows with the Jane Street group included abstract works influenced by Piet Mondrian and Jean Arp, animated by his understanding of Hofmann’s “push and pull” method. Kresch came to regard abstraction not as an end in itself, but as an armature to support representational form. The structure that abstraction gives him underlies the dynamism of his landscapes, which are striking for their highly saturated color and dry-brushed scumble at the edges of strongly contrasting hues.
In his later years, his small, intimate works have been exhibited at the Center for Figurative Painting, Lohin Geduld Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, all in New York City, among other venues. Kresch is represented in the collections of the National Academy of Design, New York City; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; the Everhart Museum, Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Wright State University Galleries, Dayton, Ohio.
