December 3 - 31, 2022
From Conduit Gallery:
“Conduit Gallery is honored to announce the third solo exhibition of work by Catherine Howe: Miracle Grow, the New York-based painter’s latest exhibition of large and small scale floral abstractions. What happens when the forest sends notes to the ears of a painter, wets their feet, and bathes their skin in hot and cold colors while standing among the trees? They could faithfully describe what they see, and record a likeness in homage. But this effort is not enough in the Anthropocene, a time in which we drive the environment as if it were a machine. What’s called for now is a response to the landscape that is intimate, as if incorporated into our bodies, so that any embrace or burn of its surface is felt by us internally. -Mike Glier In Catherine’s Howe’s newest paintings, the medium is the message. Known for the alchemy she uses in creating her own paint materials, Howe’s paintings articulate lyrical representations of flora and landscape while employing atypical mediums such as flocking, metal leaf, glass micro beads and interference micas. These enigmatic mediums engage ambient light and appear to fluctuate tonally between gold, silver and opalescence in response to light levels and the viewers’ perspective, while the thickly articulated forms offer tactile cues to a visceral experience. According to Howe, the paintings are, “an invitation to feel as much as to see”. All the senses might be engaged at this garden party, creating what Merleau-Ponty terms “synaesthetic perception.” What better way to capture all too fleeting moments of sensory awareness than with floral motifs and still life. In the ten paintings that make up the Miracle Grow exhibition, Howe’s figural
entities and the atmospheric fields they inhabit, shape a haptic vision of living flowers. For Howe, “the garden is both a metaphoric and actual space for the artwork to be realized. It’s a complex setting: culture only exists as ideas but nature is always there, and a garden contains a duality of both. My reimagined daisies and tulips, even when held captive in a vessel of sorts, seem to possess a self-consciousness and a transcendental spirit that suggests, hopefully, there’s more to this flower-waltz than a quick spin.”
Catherine Howe works in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. Her work has been discussed in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Artcritical, BOMB, Whitewall Magazine, il Giornale dell’ Arte, the New Art Examiner, and The Los Angeles Times. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively in the United States, including solo exhibitions at VonLintel Gallery, Lesley Heller Workspace, Liz Koury Gallery, Littlejohn Contemporary, Claire Oliver Gallery, Bill Maynes Gallery, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York NY, Shearburn Gallery, Slein Gallery, St Louis, MO, Von Lintel Gallery, Kim Light Gallery, Los Angeles, Ober Gallery, Kent, CT, Amy Simon, Westport CT, Madelyn Jordon, Scarsdale, NY, Cross Contemporary, Saugerties, NY, and Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX. Exhibitions abroad include Yukiko Kawase, Paris, Salama Caro Gallery, London, Von Lintel, Munich, Johan Jonker, Amsterdam. She is currently a Professor on the Graduate Painting Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she leads a seminar on contemporary art.
Reception: December 3, 2022 | 2–4 pm
1626 C Hi Line
Dallas, 75207 TX
(214) 939-0064
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