HEDGE Gallery is thrilled to kick off 2024 with LIFE IS BRUTIFUL, a solo exhibition of Liz Maugans’ recent collage-themed prints and paintings. Maugans processes and organizes knowledge using found materials, collaged monoprints, and screen prints. She often incorporates text to serve as form and function, and her new prints are autobiographical—in her words, “both beautiful and brutal.”

Liz describes her recent projects: “Making collage mixed media works provides a space to memorialize friends and family members that have passed on. It also creates a greater awareness of the universal cosmic interaction between humans and the world. The beautiful part of my art is sheer play and distraction: pushing things around to generally satisfy myself and tickling the viewer’s eyes to make something a little closer to loveliness.”

HEDGE highlights regional printmakers once a year in a featured exhibition, and is excited to focus on the ever-evolving and prolific work of Liz Maugans in 2024!

Her solo exhibit, LIFE IS BRUTIFUL, will be joined by a book-signing event at HEDGE featuring Octopus Hunting, a mind-bending collection of new essays by Richey Piiparinen with illustrations by Liz Maugans. Piiparinen has crafted fourteen essays that traverse the economy of the Rust Belt and Cleveland, Ohio, from its past triumphs to its current struggles, explaining the issues confronting the region with laser wit and mounds of research.