ED MIECZKOWSKI (1929-2017)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Ed Mieczkowski (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.
Mieczkowski exhibited regularly in Cleveland and New York as part of the Anonima Group, with their first exhibition in Cleveland in 1962, their first exhibition in New York in 1962, and their last exhibition together in 1971 at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont. The group was included in the 1965 New Tendency exhibition in Zagreb. Their 1966 exhibition Black/White and Gray Paintings 24” x 24” opened in New York then traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England in February; the Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, Poland in August; and the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland.
Mieczkowski moved his family to New York in 1967 on a one year sabbatical from the Cleveland Institute of Art, which he extended a second year. During this time, Mieczkowski taught at Pratt Institute and Cooper Union. With his family in New York, Mieczkowski kept a studio on the Bowery from 1969 to 1978, commuting to Cleveland to teach. He remained at the Cleveland Institute of Art until his retirement in 1998.
Mieczkowski was given a solo exhibition at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, Burlington in 1974 and at the Akron Art Institute [now the Akron Art Museum] in 1977. He had solo exhibitions in New York through the mid-1980s. In Cleveland, Mieczkowski had solo exhibitions at the New Gallery (now the Museum of Contemporary Art) in 1972 and 1981. Mieczkowski, along with Julian Stanczak, David Davis, and John Pearson, was the subject of a traveling exhibition Visual Logic, which opened at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1979. Other important exhibitions for Mieczkowski were: Grids, the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1972; Materials and Techniques of 20th Century Artists, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, 1976; and American Purism, Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York, 1983. Mieczkowski had a solo exhibition titled Neo-Constructivism in 1987 at the Great Northern Corporate Center in North Olmsted, Ohio, which was reviewed in Dialogue: An Art Journal by Susan Landau and in The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
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.
Ed Mieczkowski’s work has recently been included in Eye Attack: Op Art and Kinetic Art 1950-1970 at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark in 2016 and Geometric Obsession at the Museo del Arte Contemporáneo in Buenos Aires.