NEW YORK, NY.- Rachel Howard returns to New York for her first exhibition in the city since 2019 with Harvest, a solo presentation of new paintings at 447 Space. Opening September 25, the exhibition explores the act of witnessing, from the automated eye of an unmanned Reaper drone to the muddied infants referencing Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents. The paintings strip away historical romance, focusing instead on the stark contrast between sterile technology and human tragedy. At a moment defined by drone warfare, surveillance and the harvesting of data, these new works confront the distance between those who watch and those who are watched.
Drone imagery already comes pre-aestheticised - grainy, monochrome, geometric, oddly beautiful in its cold precision. By rendering the machine-vision in paint, Howard collapses two registers that are usually kept separate: the sensor feed (indexical, bureaucratic, disembodied) and the painted image (handmade, embodied, historically loaded).
Massacre of the Innocents is one of art history’s canonical images of state violence against the powerless. Citing it makes an argument that the structure of atrocity - power exercised on those who cannot see it coming or fight back - hasn’t changed, only its instruments have. The muddied infants aren’t just quoting Rubens’s baroque drama directly but degrading it, dirtying the classical composition.
Moving between high surveillance, low, and lower viewpoints isn’t merely compositional variation, it’s an argument about who gets to see and who is seen - a shift from the detachment of military language and observation to the vulnerable reality of those being watched. High-altitude, aerial views flatten people into targets; the low and “lower” vantage points restore scale and vulnerability. This chimes with critical writing on drone warfare. Grgoire Chamayou, for one, has argued that the drone’s God’s-eye view produces a kind of moral distancing baked into the optics themselves.
Howard doesn’t argue that war has changed - she argues that we have, in how we’re permitted to look at it. The Reaper’s feed and Rubens’s brushwork are separated by four centuries and one continuous question: what does it cost the viewer to witness atrocity secondhand, at a remove built into the very apparatus of seeing? Harvest offers no answer, only the discomfort of the collapse - between then and now, painted and rendered, victim and target.
Howard is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, with a degree in Fine Art and Critical Theory. She plays with the tensions between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking. She revels in the sheer joy of her material. Religion, repetition, madness, surveillance and violence are recurring themes in the work.
Howard has exhibited extensively. Selected solo institutional exhibitions include Paintings of Violence at MASS MoCA (2018-19) and MACRO Testaccio, Rome, IT (2016); Repetition is Truth - Via Dolorosa at Museo MADRE, Naples (2011) and Newport Street Gallery, London (2018); At Sea, Hastings Contemporary, UK (2015); and the Bohen Foundation, New York (2007 and 2003). Upcoming, Pallant House / Print Room alongside Frank Auerbach (2026).
Work by the artist is held in numerous institutional collections including Imperial War Museum, UK, Arts Council Collection, UK, Jerwood Collection, UK, Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina, US, Murderme, UK, Pallant House Gallery, UK, Pio Monte Della Misericordia, Naples, IT and Tia Collection, USA amongst others.
Howard is also the founder and editor of Doris Press, an independent publishing house.
