Can’t Breathe Without You

Published to accompany Rachel Howard’s solo exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles in January 2007, this catalogue includes eight full colour reproductions and an essay by Sue Hubbard, which frames a rational context for these paintings and offers a background to their aesthetic value.

Using household high-gloss paint, Rachel Howard creates tension between the pedestrian, the utilitarian and the essentially romantic. She employs gravity to influence the paint’s direction, with layers of poured building up, allowing a combination of the weight of the gloss, precision and chance to determine the landscape of each work. In these new paintings, Howard controls her medium to create grid-like imagery stretched over the canvas. There are no visible brushstrokes, no marks that suggest an intimacy with the movements of the artist, or any sinewy lines to recall the trace of her hand. Her paintings are built architecturally. The terms she uses are those of the builder: construction, reconstruction, building, layering and assembling. The mundane material she utilises stands in antithesis to the emotional states she wishes to explore: “This is spirituality for a postmodern world.”