Rachel Howard, Memory, 2006
Rachel Howard pours layers of thick luscious household paint onto gigantic canvases for a living. For the last two years she's been working flat out to get ready for two major shows in America. The first, an exhibition of abstract paintings at the Gagosian gallery's Beverly Hills space opens on 6 January and is her first outing with the uber-gallery. From the lap of that art-world luxury Howard will cross the country to New York where the Bohen Foundation have invited her to have her second exhibition with them (Howard's much-talked-about 'Guilty' show - seven enormous canvases representing the seven deadly sins - was at Bohen in December 2003). Her three-month show at the Bohen, a non-commercial space known for its significant footage in Manhattan's meat-packing district, opens on 24 February.
After leaving Goldsmith's College, Rachel Howard became Damien Hirst's assistant from 1991 to 1994. Despite having always had such impeccable art-world connections, she's never relied on them to generate success. Howard met Sarah Watson when she invited her to participate in a group show she was curating in Los Angeles' China Town, before Watson became a director at Gagosian. "Sarah wanted to continue to work together, so we stayed in touch and, along with Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and Millie Wilner from Gagosian London, I had enough support and enthusiasm to start to work toward this big show." To be taken on by Gagosian in the US is certainly a huge leap from growing up in 1970s County Durham but Howard is typically modest about the whole thing. She no longer works with dealer Anne Faggionato, her UK gallerist for years, although they remain firm friends. Her 'mother' gallery in Britain is now the ever-expanding Haunch of Venison with whom she will have her first major show in 2008. "I'm making work for it as we speak", she told me. "I told you I was slow. I need plenty of time."
"Whilst her paintings are often big and recall the heroic mysticism of Rothko, Barnett Newman or Morris Louis, she undercuts her own tendency to romanticism with a dose of the vernacular in her choice of medium, household paint", writes critic Sue Hubbard, in her foreword to the Gagosian show's catalogue. Howard first used household paint in 1995. Its fluidity was so, well, fluid, that she wanted "to conquer and control it". Hubbard continues, "The mundane material Howard employs stands in antithesis to the emotional states she wishes to explore. This is spirituality for a postmodern world."
Instead of mixing the paints on opening them, she lets them stand so that the paint separates. The top layer is then used as the medium to manipulate the pigment, which is taken from underneath. There are no visible brushstrokes in her paintings; instead she employs gravity and chance to influence the paint's direction then builds them "architecturally". The terms Howard uses are those of the builder: "construction, reconstruction, building, layering and assembling". Her new abstracts, currently making their way to LA, use a lot of red, her signature colour, to create a grid over a yellow ground which shimmers from behind like light pouring through a stained glass window. "I work slowly. I've been surprised at how much more stressful, difficult and war-like it has been painting the abstract works than the figurative", she tells me.
Unusually, Howard is equally accomplished as a figurative and abstract painter. In her figurative paintings she employs the same pouring technique, albeit less rigidly. In these smaller scale works the subject matter, described by the artist as "the beauty of tragedy", holds equal importance with the physical presence of the paint on canvas.
Rachel Howard and her family will be flying to Mexico for Christmas, then she'll fly alone to LA to hang the show. "But the gang will be joining me on the opening night!"
Forthcoming exhibitions in 2007 include a show at the Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam and Galeria Hilario Galguero in Mexico City.
Laura K Jones
Ekstasis, 2006
Household gloss and acrylic on canvas
Copyright Rachel Howard, courtesy Haunch of Venison
)
)
)