CATHERINE HOWE March 29 - May 5, 2012 | Opening Reception Thurs March 29, 6—8 PM

 Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Catherine Howe.

Lush and densely layered, Catherine Howe's canvases overflow with sensuous color, bold gesture and riotous energy. These are tactile paintings. Thick dabs of paint swirl atop Howe's distinctive backgrounds of variegated hues, sultry reds, inky blues and blacks. Spills and textured splatters of paint add to the animated exuberance Howe culls from the spontaneity of her response to material.

As the eye wanders in and through Howe's compositions her expressive marks and gestures take on a loose narrative. Rough forms emerge and take shape in the midst of the chaos—unsteady piles of fleshy fruit, a silver platter, a large bowl, flowers, a single piece of stemware. Her work calls to mind the 17th century Dutch still lifes from which Howe draws inspiration, but without the inertia, more a celebration of life than a caution of its brevity. It is within this space, somewhere between the tangible and unfamiliar, in which Howe masters the shift from the abstract to the concrete and back again, as intent on dissolving the image as creating one.

Catherine Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over twenty years. This exhibition marks a return to Von Lintel Gallery after two earlier exhibitions with the gallery in Munich. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America. The artist lives and works in New York.

CATHERINE HOWE | SELECTED WORKS 2012

 Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Bluestocking), 2012
oil and beeswax on canvas
50 x 60 in (127 x 152.4 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Flamer), 2012
oil and beeswax on linen
42 x 52 in (106.7 x 132.1 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Floater), 2012
oil and beeswax on canvas
42 x 58 in (106.7 x 147.3 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Mum), 2012
oil and beeswax on linen
45 x 58 in (114.3 x 147.3 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Proserpina (Frenchie), 2012
oil and beeswax on linen
40 x 30 in (101.6 x 76.2 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Proserpina (Lotus Eater), 2011-2012
oil and beeswax on linen
54 x 60 in (137.2 x 152.4 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Proserpina (Puff), 2012
oil and beeswax on linen
45 x 48 in (114.3 x 121.9 cm)

 Catherine Howe
Proserpina (Snowball), 2012
oil on linen
68 x 60 in (172.7 x 152.4 cm)

Catherine Howe
Proserpina (Sugar Plum), 2012
oil and beeswax on linen
45 x 48 in (114.3 x 122 cm)

CATHERING HOWE | SELECTED WORKS

Catherine Howe
Bouquet (Swanning), 2011
acrylic and oil on canvas
40 x 62 inches

Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Ruby Throated), 2010
oil on canvas
84 x 68 inches

Catherine Howe
Bouquet (Rosey), 2011
oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches

Catherine Howe
Curious Yellow (Posey), 2011
oil, beeswax and metal leaf on canvas
54 x 60 inches

Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Fizz), 2011
oil, beeswax and metal leaf on canvas
42 x 58 inches

  Catherine Howe
Night Painting (Phoenix), 2011
oil and beeswax on linen
40 x 40 inches

Catherine Howe
Proserpina (Tumble), 2010
oil on linen
60 x 52 inches

CATHERINE HOWE | SELECTED PRESS

CATHERINE HOWE | SELECTED ESSAYS

Natural Viewing:
It’s Not All About Sex and Death
By John Zinzer

Catherine Howe, addressing me, an abstract painter, is adamant: “This work is not about representation.” This outburst comes shortly after I arrive in her cramped New York Garment District studio, finding myself surrounded by a lush series of recent paintings that depict a feast of images—fruit, some half-eaten, piled up high on gleaming silver platters, intertwined with sinuous flora, phantom fleshy body parts, even a floating pig’s head—all deliciously ripe to the brink of rotting. The forms rise vertically, swept across with blurring, velocity-driven brushstrokes, and hovered-over by clouds of diaphanous oil glazing that dissipate to immateriality. Clots of mottled substance roil beneath the surface. The sum result brings to my mind historian Simon Schama’s term, “an embarrassment of riches,” which he used to describe Dutch culture in the Golden Age. Though, in Howe’s more concise description, it’s simply “a deluge.”

A few minutes pass, and now I’m seeing something completely different. I’m fixed on the iron oxide red underpainting that is shared by this series, its insistent all-overness and uninflected color. Suddenly, there is a quite literalist backdrop for this urgent agglomeration of form. What was previously naturalistic highlighting cast upon representational objects becomes anything but, yielding to the tactility of pure paint. Howe assures me that I am experiencing the natural viewing process, one that follows closely her working method. The painting is “re-grounding” itself.

Now the dynamic is established—a polarity, a push-pull tension between perceived space and material veracity, an oxymoronic logic, a painting playing by its own set of rules. If the depicted object has highlights, then it’s real. There are clear art historical sources, Chardin, among others. But all these readings collapse in the moment of the painting’s actual making. “At a certain point, I’m not looking at anything, I’m just painting,” Howe tells me.

Two hours of conversation follow, punctuated by assertions, “I am nature” (after Jackson Pollock) or “I am God” (a mimetic response to the archetypal male abstract painter ego). Both statements have to do with painting as an act of creation. Or, alternately, denials: “It’s not all about sex and death.” Think, post-structuralist negation. There are autobiographical footnotes, as well, with Howe still channeling her 1970s high school pangs of female adolescent angst (to the remembered soundtrack of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven). And always there are busy interjections, as the artist is, at every point, fighting for herself, or, alternately, fighting against herself. Either way, she’s always critical. And I use that term in the most generous sense of the word. As I keep seeing that criticality coming back into her paintings.

Howe adopts identities to construct a larger allegorical framework. Here she is Persephone, Greek goddess of innocence and queen of the underworld, who has tasted the pomegranate of carnality and been banished. Here she is Pygmalion’s muse, having been schooled by the New York artworld intelligentsia into a model of false perfection. Here she is Frankenstein, an assemblage of body parts stolen from the morgue of figurative painting. So she arrives, painting again, with renewed purpose.


— John Zinsser

CECI N’EST PAS UNE NATURE MORTE
By Michèle C. Cone
I have always been intrigued by the name given in French and in English to the genre of painting that features on a table a casual array of things like fruit, flowers, dead birds, glasses, candles, vases, skulls, books, and more. In English, it is “still life,” an expression that connotes a thing living in a pose of arrested motion, while in French the word for it is “nature morte,” which evokes a state of permanent stasis and death. Though Catherine Howe takes her motifs from the Continental tradition of nature morte, her transpositions are anything but static, her images swarm, boil over with energy, sensuality, abundance, and warmth. Her reds are hot but so are her blues, and her blacks.

Leafing through my favorite text on still life, Charles Sterling’s La Nature morte de l’antiquité au xxème siècle, I cannot find a single image to compare with Howe’s. Her paintings are not lessons in vanity -- symbolic allusions to time already lived and to life’s finality. Neither are they about things observed, expressively or photographically rendered in two dimensions. And yet her paintings share with the 17th century Dutch still life its color palette, and a flora and fauna barely piercing through abstract swirls, errant markings, and tiny spill marks. Maybe, Howe’s evocative paintings are not about still life per se, but about the naming of things transposed into paint, and the magical interaction between medium, memory and perception.

Michèle C. Cone

MELANIE WILLHIDE | "To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love — " COOL HUNTING Review

by Graham Hiemstra 

Sometimes life, as with art, takes an unforeseen turn down a path we would have never intentionally traveled, forcing us to see things differently. LA-based photographer Melanie Willhide seems to have experienced the phenomenon more often than one may like, but rather than be derailed, Willhide has been inspired. When a fire destroyed many of her belongings some years ago, she created the intensely fragile "Sleeping Beauties" series. Now, her latest body of work is named for the perpetrator that robbed her home. "To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love" is now showing at NYC's Von Lintel Gallery and, after viewing the exhibition we felt compelled to learn more about the artist's serendipitous inspiration.

 

As it happened, Willhide's laptop was stolen by a burglar, but then recovered by the police. She struggled to retrieve the wiped contents—two bodies of work, family pictures and her own wedding album—but what files she could save were corrupted. Rather than lament the loss, the artist was intrigued by the fragmented photographs and learned how to replicate the "language" used to distort them. As a result, she was able to generate more using vintage photographs and other sourced material she'd collected for visual reference. She created complementary images, bringing about what Willhide calls a "mish-mashed body of work" that she feels represents what had been stolen from the machine, and even more so, the life affected by the incident.

The bizarre duplicities and mind-bending effects achieved in "To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love" mark a stylistic departure from Willhide's earlier work, introducing a theme that is likely to continue. "Utilizing the language of the corrupted files has a lot of potential," says Willhide. "There's something really powerful about seeing the delicacy of the digital file."

 

By revealing how she creates the optical illusion in her photographs, Willhide champions the art form of digital photography as it embraces programs like Photoshop in a non-traditional sense. "It requires me to think of Photoshop in terms of how it shouldn't be used," says Willhide. Shifting concern from the authenticity of an image's subject to the image as a whole, she feels, gives photographers an "opportunity to come out against the real"—a sentiment suggesting parallels to surrealist movements across other mediums.

Read original post @ COOL HUNTING