James Howell: A Quiet Measure of Light

The James Howell Foundation and Bigaignon present A Quiet Measure of Light, the first solo exhibition in France devoted to American artist James Howell (1935–2014).

Bringing together paintings and drawings from Howell’s Series 10, the exhibition examines a question that sustained his practice for decades: how much difference is necessary for something to become visible?

A Quiet Measure of Light is structured around this threshold of visibility. Working within exceptionally narrow tonal ranges, Howell used repetition and controlled variation to test the point at which one value separates from another, a surface begins to shift, or an apparently continuous field becomes internally differentiated. His images resist immediate apprehension; their structure emerges through changes in light, distance, position, and duration.

Seen together, the works reveal reduction as a rigorous method of inquiry. Howell compressed the visual field in order to make increasingly subtle differences consequential, turning measurement, perception, and the instability of visual information into the material of the work.

“James Howell understood that limitations can generate possibility. By narrowing the field, he made the smallest differences increasingly consequential. His practice draws us into the instability of perception, where what we see is continually being recalibrated.”
—Laura Bardier, Executive Director, James Howell Foundation

As Howell’s first solo presentation in France, A Quiet Measure of Light brings renewed attention to a body of work developed with extraordinary consistency over more than five decades. The exhibition proposes the threshold itself—the unstable interval between what is visible and what is still becoming visible—as a central condition of Howell’s practice.

A Quiet Measure of Light is organized by Bigaignon in collaboration with the James Howell Foundation.

Further information
James Howell Foundation, New York
director@jameshowellfoundation.org
jameshowellfoundation.org