Charlie Howell
British multi-disciplinary artist





Home
Work
About

























Biography                                                                                                                                 News                                                                                                                                 Contact
.                                                       

 
         


British artist Charlie Howell (b. 2003) exposes the mechanisms of popular images, revealing them as transparent and exhausted mythologies. Largely working with found images, he enacts exact imitation as a medium: material authenticity is non-negotiable. The artist’s hand brands his meticulous act of reproduction with politics of authorship and artistic identity. Chasing Americana as a collective nostalgia and interrogating a cultural obsession with the ‘new’, Howell’s work is a citation of pop art and its illusions.  

Spotlit golden age mass media and advertising reflects the artist’s early access to art: Warhol’s saturated Marilyns in hairdressers, monochromatic cinema at his grandparents’. Recurrent, though sometimes physically absent, is the simulacrum of the cowboy. In a distant act of collaboration with principal influence Richard Prince, this iconoclastic image rides through Howell’s practice. 

Saloon doors and tumbleweed ‘Roombas’ signal the cowboy’s mythology: stand ins, kinetic fictions and centre stage understudies, Howell’s sculptures play to cinema’s exemption from historical truth. Mechanised saloon doors (from Wyoming) swing open and shut in series of non-revelation; a large (Nevadan) tumbleweed rolls on a rumba, not the wind pursuing a galloping Marlboro Man.  

Howell has dealt with film but rejects the tag filmmaker: as with images and objects, his manipulation of cinematic material is subtle, and is only born of the original content. In ‘Dorothy Totally Rejects Technicolour’ the artist simply reverses the found clip halfway. In the afterlife of his input, the video stares back at its reflection and sees the same image. At odds with tags of appropriation, Howell maintains a rolling conflation of real and fake, readymade and self made. In brazen analysis of consumerism, authenticity and fiction; his replications become tonic for institutional obsession with the next best thing (inevitably done before). 

Written by Oli Mardon, 2025



Selected Exhibitions

“An Even Bigger Splash”, 2025, Laurie Groves Baths, Goldsmiths “Echo Chamber”, 2025, Council Chamber, Deptford Town Hall
“Snog Studios Presents: in the clouds”, 2024, Goldsmith’s Cinema
“Midland”, 2024, New Cross, London
“Foundation Show 2023”, 2023, CGLAS, London
Education



2023-                                                                             Goldsmiths, University of London (BA)

2022-2023                                                                          City & Guilds of London Art School

2015-2022                                                                                                   The Billericay School









Born in Essex, UK
Lives and works in London






Charlie Howell