Wed 9/17 @ 5PM
Fri 9/19 @ 5-8PM
Cleveland Institute of Art alumni Mark Howard (’86) has built up a considerable body of work and name recognition in the area, with a focus on painting and sidelines in textiles and sculpture. That work led to his being given the Cleveland Arts Prize 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award. So it’s timely that a show of his new work is opening at HEDGE Gallery this week, his third new body of work at the gallery since 2021.
The new work that will be featured includes works on paper, canvas panels and two-sided painted sculptures, with what’s described “improvisational approach to color, shape and pattern.”
Howard says, “”I routinely observe my city and the people that make up its urban development, translating my impressions of daily life by orchestrating colors and shapes that move and weave across surfaces. This work is the evolving adventure I’ve discovered in pure abstraction.”
The new show will also feature abstract constructions and paintings by Chuck Fischer from New Hope, Pennsylvania. He assembled his constructions aka “tableaux reliefs,” from wood, aluminum and copper, and finishes them with colored gesso and modeling paste. It’s the first time HEDGE will show his work, and it’s the next piece of the gallery’s plan to showcase one of its represented artists, along with an artist new to the gallery whose work is in conversation with the other.
It opens on Wednesday September 17 with a preview, and officially opens on Friday September 19 during Third Friday.