Reception: Friday, April 27, 5:30–7:30
(Santa Fe, NM) In one short year, the historically significant perceptual abstraction of Ed Mieczkowski has gone from virtual obscurity in Cleveland storage units to having been featured in a widely-acclaimed lifetime retrospective at LewAllen Contemporary, the subject of national and regional art reviews, and included in significant museum exhibitions. This attention is testament to the importance of this quiet artist’s intellectual rigor, his unique contributions to Op Art and geometric abstraction, and the continuing vitality of his visually exciting work.
Mieczkowski has labored energetically for more than 40 years to examine the nature of perception and to excite perceptual activity through the interaction of art and audience. His diverse explorations have pushed the possibilities of retinal vibration. This second exhibition at LewAllen Contemporary, opening on April 27 with a reception for the artist, will showcase Mieczkowski’s recent paintings in the optical realm alongside seldom-seen examples of the artist’s historically important work from the 1960s.
As the paintings and drawings included in this new show demonstrate, Mieczkowski’s work is distinguished by a proficiency in joining complex and inventive geometric patterns with sophisticated and subtle gradations in spectral color and tonal value. This ability in both gray-scale and vibrantly colored work places him among the most versatile and accomplished practitioners of perceptual abstraction.
His work was featured in the 1964 Time magazine article that introduced Op Art to the public and in the foundational exhibition The Responsive Eye held in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is more recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Amarillo Museum in More Texas and also included in Optic Nerve, the first major reconsideration of this important genre, currently on view at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art. (Two of Mieczkowski’s paintings from the 1960s are featured as full-page illustrations in the book-length Optic Nerve catalogue written by curator Joe Houston with an introduction by Dave Hickey.)
This second exhibition at LewAllen Contemporary contrasts Mieczkowski’s historically important, foundational work—in particular his masterful use of subtle shifts in value and nuanced color in his grayscale paintings—with a small group of new paintings in electrifying color. Paintings completed in the past year deconstruct the patterns in some of his earlier Op paintings and reconstruct detailed sections on a larger scale in spectrum hues. Returning to the kinetic vibrancy of his colorful Op paintings from the 1960s, they clearly express the jubilation he has experienced since surviving emergency aortic surgery in 2004 and entering into this new and exciting phase of his long career.
Mieczkowski was a co-founder of the Anonima group that began in Cleveland in 1959 and later shared studio space in New York City and other locations. Shunning current fashion for abstract expressionism in New York and American regionalism in the Midwest, the group followed a collaboratively conceived program of geometric art that systematically explored effects of color, brightness and form on perception, thus prefiguring the Op Art movement by several years.
His painting titled Adele’s Class Ring was pictured in full color in the Time magazine article of October 23, 1964. His work in the Responsive Eye exhibition, held in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art, appeared alongside seminal work by other early Op artists, among them such internationally renowned figures as Richard Anuszkiewicz, Carlos Cruz-Diaz, Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto, Julian Stanczak and Victor Vasarely.
Mieczkowski was born in Pittsburgh in 1929 and received degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Art (BFA, 1957) and Carnegie Mellon (MFA, 1959). He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for 39 years. Now retired from teaching he is still actively creating and making new use of his expressive vocabulary of color and geometry in constantly evolving styles and media. His most recent paintings include dazzling abstractions of concepts from the new sciences, especially biomedicine and biotechnology, as well as the pure abstract paintings in this exhibition that bring Op Art into the 21st century.
Optically Enduring will run from Friday, April 27, through Sunday, May 27. A public reception for the artist will be held on opening day, Friday, April 27, 5:30-7:30. Normal gallery hours are 9:30 to 5:30 Monday through Saturday and 11:00 to 5:00 Sunday. For further information, please contact Diane Kell at (505) 988-8997 or [email protected].
