Rachel Howard

Painting with gravity, Rachel Howard embraces the fluidity of inks and paints as they drift across the canvases of her abstracted paintings. Concerned with the spaces between possibility and uncertainty, she investigates the physical properties of the materials she works with, allowing natural forces to draw upon her canvas, before she considers intervention by her own hand. Exploring themes of religion, violence, morality, and the corruption of the soul, this meditative process exemplifies the bounds of chaos and order, predictability and unruliness that binds each of us.

Rachel Howard (b. 1969) received her degree in Fine Art and Critical Theory from Goldsmith’s College in 1991. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2004. She received the British Council Award in 2008. Howard has had solo exhibitions at institutions including MACRO Testaccio, Rome (2016); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples (2011); and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2018). She’s participated in group exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum, London (2017); Sala Pelaires, Mallorca (2017); Somerset House, London (2016); Ackland Art Museum (2015); and 21er Haus, Vienna (2015), among others. Howard’s work is held in the collections of the ​Arts Council UK, the Ackland Art Museum (North Carolina, USA), the Black Flag Collection (Belgium), the David Roberts Art Foundation (UK), the Coss-Michael Foundation (Texas, USA), the Imperial War Museum (UK), the Jerwood Collection (UK), Museum van Loon (Amsterdam, NL), the Olbricht Collection (DE), Pallant House Gallery (UK), Pio Monte Della Misericordia (Naples, IT), the Reydan Weiss Collection (DE), the SMEG Collection (Italy), Tate Archive (UK), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK). Howard lives and works in London.