Winston Wachter Fine Art, New York is delighted to present Mineral Spirits, an exhibition of luminous large-scale paintings by Catherine Howe. In these dynamic new works, Howe moves her personal language of botanical painting to the edges of pure abstraction. The floral entities shift in and out of figuration, heightening their expressive power.
Imagined forms dance across iridescent surfaces, void of any vases, tables, or other natural elements that would ground them in the scale of a landscape or still life. Stripped of its natural colors, the organic imagery is imbued instead with neutral tones, metallic leaf, reflective mineral pigments and glass beads that change constantly depending on the space and position of the viewer. The works are paradoxically minimal and maximal, rhythmic and static, monochromatic and full of shifting color, all at the same time. At once careful, considered, and wildly lyrical, they convey a human connection to the inexpressible and unknowable mysteries in the natural world.
These energetic paintings explore the concept of animism, in that all things are interconnected and are imbued with both vitality and meaning. For Howe, this concept serves as a relational bridge that connects humans with something bigger than ourselves in the universe. The expressive, anthropomorphized forms are born of the human spirit and act out grand emotions, drawing inspiration from surrealism, biomorphic abstraction, and transcendentalism.
When viewing the works in Mineral Spirits, everything seems to be in motion. They are not illusionistic, but rather convey the action and energy of the artist. Constructed in layers that involve pouring, brushing and carving the media, Howe’s compositions display broad strokes of spontaneous expression and moments of slow and meticulous deliberation, a mysterious accumulation of strange yet heartfelt actions pulled out of the artist’s interior landscape.
While they recall the vigor and triumphant expressionism of post-war action painting, there is an overlay of a sophisticated feminine beauty, and an embrace of pattern and decoration that pushes these works into an entirely different realm. Exploring tension between decorative finishes and the language of gestural abstraction, they display a complicated beauty, a fusion of passion and restraint. Through these works, Howe conveys a deep empathy and respect for nature, and searches for moments of transcendence beyond the earthly realm.
Catherine Howe was born in upstate New York in 1959 and received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. The many publications that have reviewed her work include Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. She was a Professor for fifteen years in the Graduate Painting Faculty at the New York Academy of Art and Chair of the Department of Critical Studies until 2021. Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over twenty years and has been included in international exhibitions in Paris, London, Munich, and Amsterdam.
