Abattoir at the Quarter
2615 Detroit Ave, Cleveland
George Rush: Landscapes and Books
February – April 2026
Opening reception with the artist from 5 – 7 pm on Saturday, March 14, 2026
George Rush will give opening remarks at 5:15 pm at the opening reception.
Abattoir is pleased to present Landscapes and Books, a solo exhibition of gouaches and oil paintings by Columbus-based painter George Rush at our second location, Abattoir at the Quarter. As a transplanted New Yorker, George Rush approaches his adopted home of Columbus, Ohio, and the broader Midwest with the eye of an ethnographer and documentarian, while also using painting as a vehicle for personal and subjective expression. His work operates across multiple registers: as a kind of coded memoir, as a record of time and place, and as a reflection on the social structures that shape how we work and live.
For Landscapes and Books, Rush continues to draw from his ongoing archive of cell phone photographs. The exhibition brings together twenty new gouaches and three recent oil paintings in the main gallery, in which he expansively reconsiders the genre of landscape. Suburban streets, city blocks, parking lots, strip malls, highways, corporate office parks, and construction sites are treated with the same attention traditionally afforded to pastoral views. Some images are captured from a moving car, while others adopt the clear vantage point of a pedestrian.
Despite their bright sunlight, blue skies, and seemingly bucolic settings, these landscapes are marked by an almost sinister quiet. The paintings are devoid of people, yet human presence is unmistakable: a burning postal truck smolders along the side of a highway; glass office buildings mirror their suburban surroundings; fulfillment centers line freeways; a newly constructed home stands poised for landscaping. Rather than resolving into a single narrative, the works form a loose constellation of moments—an ongoing, cumulative view of the present.
Rush’s paintings of books offer a parallel body of work. These ten gouaches present closely cropped views of bookshelves, drawn from photographs taken in the self-help, psychology, lifestyle, and finance sections of used bookstores. Like the landscapes, these works function in productive tension. They echo the promise of modernist order and classification, while simultaneously indulging in a found poetics shaped by the persistent marketplace of self-improvement.
George Rush is a painter living in Columbus, Ohio. Rush has been showing internationally since 1999. His most recent exhibitions include Dresden Cabinet, KLAGG Artspace, Dresden, Germany; Curtain Walls, KOIK Contemporary, Mexico City; Night Watch at Gallery goldene Pforte, Dresden; and Double Bind at Belle Isle Viewing Room, Detroit, Michigan. He has received awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Greater Columbus Arts Council. He received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. He is Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.