Flower Market
Charles Hickey
Feia Rooftop, 6164 Oak Crest Way
May 30 – July 12, 2026
Opening: May 30, 4-9PM
“I can buy myself flowers” – Miley Cyrus
Feia is excited to present Flower Market, an outdoor exhibition by Charles Hickey and the inaugural presentation of the Feia Rooftop exhibition program. Opening on May 30th, the show features twelve new sculptural vessels that expand Hickey’s ongoing exploration of painting, decorative arts, and art historical imagery through his distinctive 3D pen technique.
For Flower Market, Hickey uses the 3D pen to draw directly onto existing ceramic vessels, layering intricate linear compositions across their surfaces. The resulting works transforms traditional vases into dense accumulations of gesture, symbol, and historical reference. Each object becomes a contemporary reworking of the still life tradition, where decoration operates simultaneously as image, structure, and narrative.
Flowers remain central within Hickey’s visual language, and in Flower Market they appear alongside a wider constellation of borrowed imagery sourced from art history, domestic ornament, and classical painting traditions. Across the vessels, floral motifs intermingle with symbols, fragments, and references drawn from historical still lifes, creating compositions that feel both familiar and disorienting. Hickey treats these inherited images less as fixed quotations than as forms that can be repeated, distorted, layered, and reimagined through contemporary process.
The exhibition reflects Hickey’s deep engagement with the history of painting, and like the visible brushwork of Impressionist painting, Hickey’s 3D pen lines preserve the immediacy of the artist’s hand, tracing movement directly onto the surface of the vase. His drawn accumulations echo painterly mark-making while introducing a sculptural dimensionality that shifts with light and perspective. Installed on the rooftop environment, sunlight moves across the layered pen drawings throughout the day, emphasizing texture, shadow, and the tactile density of the surfaces. This setting reinforces the exhibition’s dialogue between historical interior traditions and the contemporary urban landscape surrounding them.
As the inaugural exhibition on the Feia Rooftop, Flower Market establishes it as a place for interdisciplinary practices that engage sculpture, painting, design, and architecture in direct conversation with the environment. The exhibition reflects Feia’s commitment to artists who reinterpret historical visual languages through materially experimental contemporary forms.
