Edwin Mieczkowski (1929-2017) Framed Lithograph

Edwin Mieczkowski, American (1929-2017)

Edwin Mieczkowski was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1957 and his MFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1959. That same year he was asked to return to the Cleveland Institute of Art to teach drawing.

In 1960 Mieczkowski was assigned to redesign the perspective and cabinet drawing course at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He asked the Institute’s director to allow Francis Hewitt, by then a painting instructor there, to co-teach the class. To create their Dimensional Drawing course, the two expanded on earlier discussions they had at Carnegie Tech while Hewitt was completing his BFA and Mieczkowski was a graduate student. The formulations and “work language” they developed to suggest space on a two-dimensional surface led others at the conservative art school to think they were talking in code. Mieczkowski and Hewitt gained support from their first students when the Cleveland Museum of Art opened its Paths of Abstract Art exhibition in the fall of 1960 and students could identify how the artists had used cues of size difference, overlap events, and brightness differences to suggest space. Mieczkowski also lectured at Western Reserve University [now Case Western Reserve University] in Cleveland from 1963 to 1966.

Mieczkowski, along with the Anonima Group, began to receive attention in 1964 with the group’s first New York exhibition. His painting titled Adele’s Class Ring was pictured in full color in the Time magazine article (October 23, 1964) that introduced Op Art to the public. In 1965 Mieczkowski’s work sold well in the exhibition Vibrations Eleven at the Martha Jackson Gallery and he was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Eye. In 1965 Mieczkowski received a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts in 1966. In 1968 Mieczkowski participated in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Second Arts Festival, exhibiting Small Bloc #2.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Mieczkowski explored geometric and perceptual abstraction while teaching. He completed many public art commissions, including Sommer’s Sun, a large tondo at the Cleveland Public Library. In the 1980s Mieczkowski began to execute his abstractions in three dimensions, creating colorful and energetic sculptures in painted wood, steel, or aluminum.

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. Mieczkowski moved to California in 1998, where he continues to paint, exploring representations of scientific concepts through geometric abstraction. In 2009 Mieczkowski received the Alumni Achievement Award from Carnegie Mellon University. Museums with his work include: Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, Vermont; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.

Overall Size: 23" x 35"

Condition: Good Condition. Some warping of paper. Not inspected outside of frame.