Rachel Howard: You Have a New Memory

Rachel Howard: You Have a New Memory
1 October–14 November 2021
Simon Lee Gallery
12 Berkeley Street
London, W1J 8DT
United Kingdom

Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present You Have a New Memory, Rachel Howard‘s inaugural exhibition with the gallery in London. The show brings together a new body of work that continues Howard’s pursuit of the possibilities of painting through experimentation.

Throughout the past 25 years, Howard has explored and challenged the capacities of paint, creating works that grapple with notions of uncertainty, fragility, beauty, and pain. Revelling in the sheer joy of her chosen material, Howard’s intensely physical approach to painting encourages tensions to play out between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction.

In this exhibition Howard returns to colour with zeal, presenting paintings that endeavour to express the instability of life, the absurd, along with fantasies of an unknowable future. A series of new, large canvases includes works such as You Have a New Memory, albeit a synthetic one, a reminder of things past, a veiled recollection of the before time.

Similarly, the subject of the painting Laughing Tree, is not a real tree but a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Synthetic nature is scrolled on the canvas, veils of ‘fake’ flowers and leaves flow down the surface, dissolving into the distance, atomised into a haze. Sharp lines slice through the spray, prompting the viewer to consider is it weather, is it static or a glitch?

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Howard focusses on the vista, the path to Edge, walked, painted, drawn, photographed, and filmed by the artist for over a decade. These small works are painted sometimes in situ, sometimes from photographs but often from memory, or a memory of a feeling. Some are intensely worked, others swiftly transcribed. For Howard, the repetition of rendering the view acts as a form of security and certainty in an ambiguous world: this place does exist, this is real, the artist is not mad.

Downstairs, Howard’s ongoing series of flower sculptures map her curiosity with what paint can do. Howard presents fake plastic flowers that have been submerged and resubmerged into buckets of acrylic primer, then left to hang upside down to drip dry. The plastic stems and petals become soft curves; their forms manipulated by the force of gravity on the liquid medium. Formed by a blend of artifice and chance, the works are finally dipped in household gloss paint, giving a deceptive appearance of porcelain or bone.

The sculptures bring to mind Chinese scholars’ rocks, the process has parallels: the stones would be chosen, cut and carved, then left in lakes so water would erode their forms. Not quite nature, not quite art, the rocks become both at once. In Howard’s sculptures time is suspended in the curves and surfaces of an evocative object of contemplation. Howard integrates her synthetic floral forms within wooden plinths, choosing to place them not on top of the structure but in a recess underneath the surface, as well as using the floor as the final resting place for the sculptures elsewhere in the gallery.

Rachel Howard: You Have a New Memory opens on the 1st of October until the 14th of November 2021 at Simon Lee Gallery

©2021 Rachel Howard, Simon Lee Gallery