An exhibition of Rachel Howard’s newest paintings and sculptures.
The exhibition focuses on internal and external violence, the violence of the mind and the body. Der Kuss, the kiss, is a delicate point of intimate contact, of love or betrayal.
The exhibition is divided into two rooms, in the first are paintings of grids and lines, disintegrated surfaces that hint at unstable worlds, entropy and collapse. There are also crashed planes here; based on everyday press images. Howard suspends the image in a pastel haze, transmuting these snapshots into images of universal suffering, or perhaps they are self-portraits installed into a delicate afterlife, where we can look at them forever.
In the same room, with her new series of sculptures, Not the last (RSM) #1-7, Howard has taken packs of kitsch plastic flowers, the type you might find at a makeshift memorial. Dipping the flowers into an acrylic medium, she repeatedly coats them before they are hung upside down to drip and dry. The plastic stems and petals become soft curves, their forms carved by the force of gravity on a liquid medium. Formed from a blend of artifice and chance, the new objects are then cast in bronze. A simultaneous nod to nature (erosion, gravity, death) and unchangeable synthetic form, time is suspended in the curves and surfaces.
In the second room are the four large abstract paintings that form the quartet titled On Violence (Spring), On Violence (Summer), On Violence (Autumn) and On Violence (Winter) (2017). On Violence is a reference to Hannah Arendt’s book that distinguishes between violence and power. When applied to Howard’s paintings the title takes on a new rhythmic force. Even as the seasons change, violence persists – even foregrounded – as if it were the driving force to all human history. Meanwhile, the seasons come around again, tucked away in brackets, powerless. The paintings start with a large curtain textile that the artist uses to push paint onto the canvas, revealing patterns, reapplying with varying intensities to create smudges and areas of pooled pigment. The seasons are demarcated subtly by the artist’s choice of pattern, which might vary within the same painting. For spring, we see figures from nursery rhymes, while summer is lush with flowers and leaves, and winter’s bare tendrils are more rigid and formal. For Howard ‘the pattern conjures an interior with a history…’ and alludes to the raw fragmented nature of memory, as the pattern is forced onto the surface, but then slips away or is erased. Howard says ‘We are presented with endless imagery, shorn off walls of homes in war zones exposing the intimate everyday environment within, broken walls of private spaces of supposed safety’.
The exhibition is concurrent with Rachel Howard’s solo museum exhibition at:
Newport Street Gallery, London, 21 February — 28 May 2018
| Duration | 24 January 2018 - 17 March 2018 |
| Times | Monday to Friday: 10am – 6pm Saturday: 10am – 5pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Blain Southern |
| Address | 4 Hanover Square, London, W1S 1BP |
| Contact | / info@blainsouthern.com / www.blainsouthern.com |