Ghislaine Howard is known as a painter of powerful and expressive means, whose work charts and interprets our shared experience.
She was named as a Woman of The Year in 2008 for her contribution to art and society. A painter of powerful and expressive means.
She first came to public attention with her ground-breaking exhibition concerning pregnancy and birth, the first of its kind, at Manchester City Art Gallery, A Shared Experience the exhibition attracted much critical acclaim.
She has worked on commissioned projects with various diverse communities including cathedrals, theatres, prisons, the BBC, Women’s Refuges and as well as with major organisations such as Amnesty International.
She has shown her large cycle of paintings The Stations of the Cross / The Captive Figure to great acclaim at the two Liverpool Cathedrals at Canterbury Cathedral and other venues as part of an ongoing tour of cathedral cities in UK. Her 25 foot high Visitation Altarpiece can be seen in Trinity Chapel at Liverpool Hope University
For Liverpool’s celebrations as Capital of Culture she produced a major new work The Empty Tomb which was unveiled by the Bishop of Liverpool on Easter Sunday 2008.
She is continuing to work on a series of paintings in response to news images taken from the Guardian newspaper – an exhibition of 365 of these paintings was shown at Imperial War Museum North from March to September 2009. These are forming the basis of a major new series The Seven Acts of Mercy.
From February to May 2013, Ghislaine’s drawing Pregnant Self Portrait July 1987 was at the centre of the British Museum’s ground breaking exhibition, Ice Age Art / Arrival of the Modern Mind, where it was placed alongside 30,000 year old sculptures of pregnant women, some of the earliest representations of the human form. The film that accompanied the exhibition ‘Ice Age Art: the Female Gaze’ has attracted over 65,000 views on YouTube.
She has featured in various publications and television documentaries including Degas: An Old Man Mad about Art, 1996 and Degas and the Dance in 2004, which was awarded the prestigious international Peabody Award.
Her work has played a central role in the three immensely successful and inspirational exhibitions curated by the renowned filmmakers, artists and curators, Al and Al. Bearing the overarching title ‘The Fire Within’, the exhibitions were situated in the open spaces of a transformed shopping mall in the centre of Wigan town known as The Galleries. The second exhibition, ‘Love is a Rebellious bird’ featured over 50 of Ghislaine’s works. The third and final show ended in late 2021.
In early 2020 Ghislaine’s powerful ‘Pregnant Self-Portrait, July 1984’ featured in ‘Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media’ at the Foundling Museum, London. The exhibition explored representations of the pregnant female body through portraits and included works by Holbein, Lucien Freud and Chantal Joffe.
Ghislaine’s drawing, ‘Pregnant Self-Portrait, 1987’ in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery was one of the central works in gallery’s exhibition, ‘Still Parents’. This powerful and deeply moving exhibition won many awards including including the ‘Museums Change Lives Award’, 2021-22.
In spring of 2023, Ghislaine worked with the charity ‘Appetite Stoke’ and Arts Keele to curate an exhibition of over 50 of her 365 panels and with Michael ran a workshop for refugees and asylum seekers.
In 2023 Ghislaine entered into a collaborative partnership with St. Stephens’s House in Oxford, a number of her works may be seen throughout the building.
Ghislaine and Michael are very excited that Bolton Art Gallery have agreed to be partners in the next stage of 10 Boroughs / 10 Paintings. The new installation at Elliot House on Deansgate will centre upon a ‘conversation’ with Barbara Hepworth’s beautiful drawing of ‘The Magnifying Glass’ one of the eight magnificent ‘Fenestration Series of Drawings’ that she made in 1948 that is part of their collection. More news soon.
A permanent, but changing, exhibition of over 100 of Ghislaine’s paintings is on view at the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce. Situated in the Elliot House, one of Manchester’s iconic Victorian buildings at 151 Deansgate, Manchester. It is open to visitors during working hours and on the last Friday afternoon of every month all the rooms are available to view. The ground floor rooms are co-curated by Al and Al, the creative directors of Haigh Hall, whilst the second floor is dedicated to work associated with the ’10 Boroughs / 10 Paintings’ project. over the next 6 years, Ghislaine and her art historian husband, Michael will choose one work from each of the ten borough’s galleries to create a specially curated installation in which contemporary issues will be explored inspired by the chosen artwork. The present installation centres upon Lord Leighton’s spectacular ‘Captive Andromache’ from Manchester City Art Gallery. Its subject is taken from Homer’s Illiad, she has lost her husband, killed by Achilles and seen her son murdered before her. Her city destroyed, she is now no longer a princess of Troy, but a slave in a distant land. The contemporary resonance of this timeless story is self-evident.
Ghislaine is represented in many public and private collections including the Royal Collection.
A major monograph, Ghislaine Howard, the Human Touch, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, 1980-2016, written by Michael Howard and published by Manchester Metropolitan University Press was published in 2017.
Selected critical comments:
Concerning A Shared Experience, Manchester City Art Gallery
It is through Howard’s moving embodiment of empathy that she really makes her mark. Her work is so intimately tender in approach it could hardly have been painted by any male at any time anywhere.
Robert Clark, The Guardian
Concerning The Stations of the Cross /The Captive Figure
Howard is well on her way to becoming one of the great humanist artists of our time.
Zaria Shreef, The Big Issue
Ghislaine Howard’s images are compelling, powerful, and emphatic. They are unusual in that they communicate man’s inhumanity to man to the art lover and lay person alike. These are very important paintings that transcend the limitations of the gallery space to speak to us all.
Dr. Helen Bamber, Medical Foundation for the CaVictims of Torture