ART & DESIGN

Artist Ridley Howard Brings New Work to Leo Koenig Gallery

Ridley Howard continues to blur the line between painterly romance and pop tradition with a new series of soft-focus works, on display beginning this Thursday at the Leo Koenig gallery in New York. "It blends...


blog-ridley-howard-portrait-Wshot.jpg

However, for his second show with the gallery, entitled Slows, Howard’s inspirations are equally rooted in the contemporary, including Italian modernist painters like Felice Casorati and Gino Severini. “I had been doing these paintings of nudes and couples, but to me, the spaces in those paintings had just become geometric abstractions,” Howard explains. So he pushed that a step further and began to create pure geometric abstractions in addition to his traditional works. “If I wanted to make a painting about color and shape, I should do just that. The connection to a more traditional portrait will come out as the works develop.”

Slows, the title of Howard’s show, is emblematic of the brilliant tension that underpins his work. “I think that painting is interesting in this world of Internet speed in that paintings kind of reveal themselves over time,” says Howard. “They’re not fast like snapshots of jpegs. There’s a bit of a lingering sense of time.”

Slows is on display at the Leo Koenig gallery from January 19 through February 25. Visit leokoenig.com