Brad Howe

For Los Angeles-based sculptor Brad Howe (b. 1959, Riverside, CA), the practice of art making is inextricably tied to a conception of the world as a kind of language for which experience is tasked with finding the words. The function of art, as Howe conceives it, is to expand one’s vocabulary such that the contours of life can become increasingly comprehensible and the meaning that lies latent in the peripheries of experience can be articulated and more carefully described. Much like the open-ended, intuitive approach he takes in his work, Howe’s path to becoming an artist was not direct but circuitous. Having studied Literature and International Relations at Stanford, Howe traveled to Brazil to attend the University of São Paulo with the intention of pursuing a career in diplomacy. Instead, he fell in with a group of architecture students whose optimism in the ability of design to address the important problems of modern life inspired Howe to start experimenting with form, color, and space. Without any formal artistic training and only a book of Calder’s work as a reference, Howe began cutting pieces of wire and scrap metal, arranging them into kinetic mobiles that took after Calder but with a sense of color and shape inflected by the visual culture of Brazil in the 80s, with its penchant for high chroma, strong contrasts, and dynamic movement. Since returning to the U.S., Howe has established a reputation for working in a variety of sculptural formats, producing painting-like wall works, free standing sculptures, and expansive public installations, in addition to the kinetics for which he first became known. Over the past 40 years, Howe’s practice has evolved through a sustained negotiation of opposing forces, balancing the extremes of color and mass to create vibrantly clashing metal forms that rise in the air with a deceptive weightlessness, sometimes hovering like technicolor mirages. Identifying as a gardener, Howe’s sculptures are the result of patient observation and a dogged devotion to the insights of intuition, imagination, and memory. Using the formal language of classical modernism and its mid 20th century West Coast offshoots (e.g. Minimalism, Light & Space, Pop, and Post-Pop), Howe has developed a means for translating the ever fleeting experience of contemporary life into striking objects that straddle the line between physical presence and graphic exuberance. Brad Howe’s work has been exhibited internationally across North and South America, Europe, and Asia, and can be found in public and private collections worldwide.