INTRODUCTION by THOMAS KRENS

My first deep experience of Rachel Howard's work took place in the early 2000's when I saw her exhibition at the Bohen Foundation on West 13th Street in New York City. That encounter lead to a sustained relationship to the work that ripened into open admiration. Several years later, in 2004, I organized an exhibition, entitled Intuition/(Im)precision, at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac during the Salzburger Festspiele. The exhibition was conceived and built around Kazimir Malevich's Black Square which was lent to the gallery by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg - and included mainly monochromatic painting and sculpture by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz West, Richard Serra, Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin, Anselm Kiefer, Dan Flavin and Roni Horn among others. Rachel's work was a key part of the show. Intuition/(Im)precision was inspired to some degree by Herman Melville's description - in his most extraordinary of novels, Moby Dick - of Captain Ahab's obsession with the great white whale, and the degree to which self-knowledge and awareness about obsession becomes either a conscious component of the creative process, or an intuitive by-product.

As I now recall my intense encounter with Ms Howard and her work from the perspective of fifteen years, in the artist's latest series, Paintings of Violence (Why I am not a mere Christian), I can detect a unique and what seems to be a far deeper complexity - a complexity of composition, of concept, and of execution that, despite the resemblance of the earlier work in its most striking feature - the luxurious, luminous and threatening shades of red that comprise the structure of the individual paintings - augurs a persistent and growing obsession to merge her mind, her actions, and her imagery to create a specialized artistic experience. On the one hand, a superficial visual and material similitude is perhaps the least important aspect of Ms Howard's message. On the other, with monotonous similitude, she has by now professionalized her obsession; and her obsession hangs over the new suite, its installation, and her comments about it like a gathering cloud preparing to drop its burden of moisture on a generally parched environment. Indeed, her obsession becomes the dominant theme of the work. The descriptive subject matter, and the literary and the art historical references, add a narrative and subjective depth that provoke a consideration of alternative dimensions and interpretations of the work of course. But its essence is performance: painting as dance, movement, intellectual rigor and extreme economy in the application of an intense, repetitive, layered, disciplined and infinite gestural difference.

Ms Howard is eloquent in describing her process. Despite the allegorical, literary, and political overtones and references (my words), in her own words she says these paintings are "not about a bacchanalian violence, but the steady calm hand of violence on a greater scale. Maximum damage, planned and calmly carried out, hence the slow slice through the alizarin crimson oil paint, exposing the fluorescent beneath, raw and defenceless, the repetition of canvas after canvas, the same but different."

Rigorous and considered obsession requires discipline. By draining her activity of gestural drama and replacing it with monotonous repetition, she actually amplifies the drama in much the same way that minimalist artists, dancers, and performers in the 1960s and 1970s framed their activity in advance, most often with a strict, repetitive, economical, and often banal means, and transformed the humble activity into a cultural experience far more complex because of the ways they gathered and distributed time and emotion one thinks of Andy Warhol’s Empire. Merce Cunningham's collaborations with John Cage. Robert Morris's performance art and the minimalist choreographer Sally Gross.

These artists brought the interested viewer to the point where the tedious becomes baroque. Similarly, in Ms Howard’s work the layers and the progression of color become something framed, and the actual making of the painting proceeds ongoing mental exercise other than the repetition itself. The decisions have already been made, and the outcome is determined by the point at which Ms Howard decides to stop, and move on to the next canvas in the same manner. And the results are different.

While red in the full spectral range of the color has become a Rachel Howard trademark of sorts, in her hand her obsession and discipline never allows the result to descend into banality. The power of the color to evoke powerful emotions is continually reinforced by the artist’s infinite capacity for minimal gestural difference. When I first saw Ms Howard’s work 15 years ago, I saw her occupying a territory in the visual landscape that included artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Robert Ryman, Wolfgang Laib, Hermann Nitsch and Roni Horn. All artistic personalities and handwritings are different, of course. What makes the viewing and consideration of Rachel Howard’s differences so stimulating are the degrees to which she marks out intellectual perspective and physical practice through her work that has the capacity to stimulate the imagination, to see the things that she has in her mind. Violence and the banality of evil come across in a tightly controlled frame that is essential to the success of each painting. Rachel Howard’s Paintings of Violence may be her best work yet.

Thomas Krens

Director Emeritus

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

New York