Catherine Howe takes a personal language of botanical painting to the edges of pure abstraction, creating a lyrical world where minuscule flowers speak about universal notions.
Often painted in thick relief, her highly gestural works feature pours, sculptural brushwork, iridescent fields and gilded surfaces. The objective world of nature is projected into the ineffable, ethereal realm of the spirit, where abstraction is not apart from representation, merely a heightening of its expressive power.
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 The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. She was a Professor for twenty years on 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 internationally for over thirty years.
