"Burschi"

gelatin silver print on cardboard, cutted

copyright stamp on verso

"Burschi makes aurated spaces topple, turns hierarchies upside down," is how Christine Frisinghelli from the Camera Austria association explains a typical trait in Dressler's humour, which is as light-footed as it is insidious. Frisinghelli curated the show together with Michael Mauracher and Rainer Iglar from Fotohof Salzburg, where Dressler had many of his photo books published.
Dressler discovered the name of his cardboard companion on a walk through the city: "Unserem lieben Burschi" ("To our dear Burschi") was written on a memorial plaque in the Wienfluss basin. It is the interest in signs in urban space that also characterises his early works: for wall scrawls and commandment plaques, but also for statues and architecture. Dressler treated collected photos according to the "set box principle", i.e. he placed them in ever new constellations in order to explore the grammar of the city.
From the 1980s onwards, he discovered yet another format for himself: situationally comic and, in the best cases, wonderfully poetic series of pictures, often dealing with human idiosyncrasies. In Immediate Proximity (1997), for example, shows him as a hyper-motivated art collector who, out of sheer love for the work of art, "corrects" it. Dressler's desire for artistic-self-reflexive allusions is evident in Greifbare Schönheit (1992), whose protagonist tracks down a bottle dryer in a Paris department stores' in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp. On the other hand, Business Class (1996), in which a greedy businessman packs up his hotel room: he not only steals the shampoo bottles, but also stuffs the bed linen into his suitcase.
Dressler's method was always the same: he was concerned with achieving the greatest possible poetry with small gestures. That's why Dressler always played the main role in his sequences himself: "Then I don't have to explain anything to anyone."
(Roman Gerold, derstandard.at,16.11.2016)