Ridley Howard - Blues, Legs, Pools: Stockholm

Andréhn-Schiptjenko is proud to present Ridley Howard’s first solo-exhibition at the gallery.

The exhibition is the artist’s first major exhibition in Europe and consists of eleven new paintings. They are a selection of both figurative and abstract motifs. During most recent years Ridley Howard has gone from making portraits of nudes and couples to additionally making paintings which focus more exclusively on geometric abstraction. He was the first person to be granted a solo exhibition in conjunction with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Travelling Fellowship. He travelled to Italy where 20th century painters such as Antonio Donghi, Felice Casorati and Gino Severini inspired him and the new body of work.

“I love the scope of their work, ranging from classical figuration, to futurism, to Bauhaus-like abstraction. Seeing unexpected connections between different ways of thinking about painting really influenced new directions in my work. It’s also interesting to see how 20^th century Italian painting absorbed ideas and styles from other places and morphed it into something else. That seems related to the way a lot of painters think today.”

Ridley Howard’s paintings display a cool yet personal relationship to both subject matter and image. Simple depictions of people, architectural spaces, landscapes are infused with a specific painterly sensibility. The works incorporate the vernacular of vastly different genres of painting, among them high renaissance, pop art, and abstraction. Subtle and deceptively straightforward, the paintings invoke a sense of monumentality while retaining a lingering intimacy and stillness.

He experiments with how the elemental forces of painting, colour, shape, and design coalesce into something with emotional resonance. The moderately sized paintings call for intimate viewing, not just because of their scale but because Howard paints with exquisite care.

Ridley Howard was born 1973 in Atlanta, Georgia, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an MFA from Tufts University and has been the recipient of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work is currently shown in a solo-exhibition, Fields and Stripes, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA (through October 13). Earlier this year he has had solo-exhibitions at SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design, one in Savannah, GA and the other in Atlanta, GA. His work has also been included in exhibitions at institutions such as, among others, the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville TN, and The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Ridley Howard has been invited to hold a lecture on October 4 at The Royal Art Institute in Stockholm.