Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is a British artist whose works often explore the tensions between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction.

Born in County Durham in 1969, she graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1991. Throughout her practice, religion, repetition, mortality, madness and violence have formed recurring themes.

She revels in the sheer joy of her material, investigating notions of uncertainty, fragility, beauty and horror through her process. The resulting sometimes unapologetically emotional paintings can be very large in scale or tiny vignettes of tragedy. Howard often displays an irreverence for her material, using gravity as an invisible paintbrush to get the desired effect. More recently she has returned to oil paint, sprayed over nets and used as gigantic brushes.

In 1992 Howard was awarded the Princes Trust Award, was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2004 and received the British Council Award in 2008. She has exhibited widely with notable solo shows held at the Newport Street Gallery, Blain|Southern and MASS MoCA in Massachusetts. 

Rachel Howard lives and works in the UK.