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Rachel
Howard
Repetition is Truth – Via
Dolorosa
Museo d’Arte contemporanea
DonnaREgina,
Via Settembrini 79, 80139, Naples,
Italy
16 April – 4 July
2011
Opening night: Saturday 16 April, 7 – 9
pm
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Three paintings from Repetition is Truth – Via
Dolorosa
series
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Via Dolorosa, Latin for ‘Way of Suffering’,
is the name of a street within the Old City of Jerusalem, believed to be the
path that Jesus walked, bearing the cross, towards his crucifixion. It is also
another name for the fourteen Stations
of the Cross, which depict these final hours of his life – the
Passion.
While Howard’s fourteen paintings reference
the Passion, the creation of the series was in fact provoked by one of
the most shocking photographs to emerge from the prison camp at Abu Ghraib in
Iraq. Detainees routinely endured
torture and humiliation at the hands of American military personnel, as exposed
through the media. The particular
image was of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded and wired with electrodes;
thus the box becomes the modern
day equivalent of the Cross – a tool of humiliation and
torment.
Howard’s paintings ebb and flow creating a
metaphysical journey between abstraction and figuration, offering
a compelling observation of human rights abuses and the appalling ability of
women and men to demonstrate
extreme cruelty towards each
other.
Art historian and curator Joachim Pissarro has
described the series as “sublime”, in accordance with Kant’s
Critique
of Judgement: “The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of
form, so far as it immediately involves, or else
by its presence, provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a
super-added thought of its totality.” It is this
idea of limitlessness that Howard seeks to engage with, the belief that human
suffering is never-ending, hence the
name of the work – Repetition is
Truth.
For further information on the exhibition, please
contact Mark
Inglefield
T: +44 758 419 9500 | E: mark@blainsouthern.com
Notes to
Editors:
Rachel Howard was born in County Durham, 1969 and
graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, 1992.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Still Life / Still Here, Rachel Howard, New
Paintings, Sala Pelaires, Palma de
Mallorca, Spain, 2011; Human Shrapnel – oil drawings on paper, Other Criteria,
London, 2010; Der Wald, Haunch
of Venison, Zurich, 2009; Portraits, Museum van Loon, Amsterdam; How to
Disappear Completely, Haunch of
Venison, London, 2008; Rachel Howard, New Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, Los
Angeles and Fiction/Fear/Fact,
Bohen Foundation, New York, 2007. Howard’s work can be found in a variety
of public and private collections;
amongst others: Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina; Museum van Loon, Amsterdam;
Goss-Michael Foundation,
Dallas; CCA Andratx, Spain, and the Murderme and Hiscox collections.
The works featured in this exhibition are part of a private collection.
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