Early Work
Solo show, Green Gallery
21-30 August 2026
Imitation Sticky Catcher (Four-Foot Tall), 2026
Fig Leaves, 2026
Untitled (Day)/Untitled (Night), 2026
Automatics [Series], 2025-26
British artist Charlie Howell (b. 2003, Essex) 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.
Iconoclastic images from Americana ride through Howell’s practice via stand ins, kinetic fictions, and centre-stage understudies. Hollywood and Essex, where the artist is from, act as substitutes for each other: aspiration rests on cinema’s exemption from historical accuracy. A foot rests on the biting point between truth and fiction.
Across two “acts”, Howell’s recent Goldsmiths graduate degree show disappeared and renewed overnight. Through simulating a booth within a booth and staging an exhibition swap over between days, Howell continued to operate at odds with tags of appropriation. Investigating the exhibition itself as a material, he revealed it as something capable of performance, reconfiguration, and motion. How do artworks occupy and interfere in a space, disguise it and activate it?
These questions are architectures underpinning Early Work. Early Work exploits the immediate reading of this phrase, clad in retrospective drip of “new” and “later” work; which don’t exist. Instead, Early Work is concerned with origins: commercial prototypes, deterioration, early printing processes. Each work is aspirational, yet second hand, bearing its mechanical roots.
Early Work functions through subtle systems akin to the precise technologies Howell uses to fabricate his works. The parameters must be meticulous. Reproduction operates as production and images become utilitarian. Scale is a signpost to what has been transformed, but also why. Selected works jointly question the contradictions of institutional rhetoric which fetishises originality, yet is obsessed with retrospection.
Imitation Sticky Catcher (Four-Foot Tall) enlarges flytraps Howell found printed with orange flowers. The blown up replication draws on industrial style printing used in Warhol’s Four Foot Flowers: the viewer outside the window peers into the exhibition through CMYK printing dots and registration errors. Under a double identity of architecture and display, the decorative surrenders to the impulse of the promotional.
But what is being promoted? A vacuum opens out behind each work into the hollow of sold services, products, ideas. Most of this exhibition is moving, capturing, and transforming. At once a display vehicle and artwork, The Automatics Series rotates novelty lenticular images. Interchangeable and automated, our conditions of viewing are disclosed where images are fake and in motion; we do not so much “see” as are “shown”. As people we are “desiring-machines”.
In a gentle touch, Fig Leaves point back to a replication of David both ornate and dissolve into the gallery’s interior. Relaxed humour via roman numeric titling of the works points to their absurd over-mediation. Nature has become hand-carved marble has become plaster casting has become the touch of a CNC machine.
In Early Work, authorship brazenly removes its hand. Working from afar, Untitled (Day) / Untitled (Night) uses UV exposure to intervene with a postcard. The slightest alteration, orange to blue, transforms a mass produced postcard into a work of art. Held still in an alcove, Howell asks us to consider ownership and the value of objets d’art.
Beyond the institution of art school, Howell’s works immediately perform the next institutional language. His first exhibition post-Goldsmiths, Early Work toys with making his work the next appropriated object: when and where does work truly ‘exist’? In brazen analysis of consumerism, authenticity and fiction; his replications become tonic for institutional obsession with the next best thing (inevitably done before).
Exhibition text: Oli Mardon