January 15 - February 21, 2026
Please join us for the opening on Thursday January 15th from 6 to 8 pm
"The best brains come from fully grown animals.
They are fattening and increase the size of the eater’s brain."
In shows since 2020 (e.g. Texting the Humours, Miraculous Network), Howlett stages a hybrid abstraction inspired by humoral theory—an ancient physiology that linked bodily fluids to relations of temperament, seasons and elements. Paintings become metaphorical systems of absorption and insertion: partially by way of material fact and partially by the mapping of emotional and physical bodies in states of dynamic imbalance. In recent painting these threads continue a melancholic assembling of found and imagined spaces, particularly via structure, pattern and colour.
Some of the spaces are inspired from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, an illustrated, early renaissance guide to health, that expounds the theoretical roots of classical Greek and Roman medicine. Others come from the artist's home, like a trio of paintings on tea towels, or simply arise within the evolution of a painting.
For Galen, the 2nd century Roman physician, the humours are based on pneumata, particles that travel through the blood, becoming ‘natural’ spirits in the liver, ‘vital’ spirits in the heart and ‘animal’ spirits in the brain. Thomas Aquinas called the latter common sense, the brain being the site of the rational soul’s functions: sense perception, imagination, thought and memory. In this recent work, the painted spaces might be considered rooms or bodies, themselves sites of spirits. One enters a dialogue of continuous shifts between figure and ground, space and surface, sense and non-sense, eye and brain.
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