above: “H.M. No. 5″, 2026. Monotype diptych on two 30″ x 22” sheets.
Manneken Press announces twenty-seven new monotypes by Catherine Howe, created during the artist’s October visit to its Bloomington studio. The unique prints comprise three series—“Black Garden D.E.,” “Flower Float,” and “H.M.”—and are available now.
Across the three series, Howe transforms floral imagery into expressive, often anthropomorphic forms. Through direct painting, scraping, and trace monotype, she combines intuitive gestures with vivid contrasts of color and texture, giving flowers a sense of movement and independent life.
The series range from large, single-flower compositions in chromatic black to colorful traced images and exuberant brush-painted arrangements. Handmade paper provided the starting point for “Black Garden D.E.,” while an unexpected studio soundtrack—Handel’s Messiah—gave “H.M.” its name.
Black Garden D.E.
A small stack of handmade Khadi paper from India in the large Double Elephant format inspired “Black Garden D.E.” These unique prints present single flowers as monumental figures, their stems and blossoms suggesting an independent presence. Howe painted and scraped the images directly onto large Plexiglas plates using chromatic-black intaglio ink mixed to allow fluid movement across the surface.
Flower Float
The more colorful “Flower Float” series uses trace monotype. A thin layer of ink is rolled onto a plate, and a sheet of printing paper is laid over it. The artist draws on the back of the sheet with a pencil or stylus; the pressure transfers ink to the paper’s underside, producing the printed image while leaving the drawing on the back. The negative image remaining on the plate can also be printed. Half of the impressions in “Flower Float” were made from these negative images.
H.M.
For “H.M.,” Howe painted directly onto Plexiglas plates with brushes, creating exuberant floral compositions in strong color harmonies. Howe recalls the studio session with Jonathan Higgins, Manneken Press’s director and master printer:
”I’m not sure how we ended up with Handel‘s Messiah blasting in the Print studio, but it resulted in a group of works we called H. M. in its honor. These works were directly painted with brushes on plexiglass plates with strong color harmonies, and exuberant floral imagery that dances all over the compositions. We mixed up a riotous ensemble of inks in different hues and values, resulting in pieces with a beautifully varied palette of color and movement. I tried very hard not to sing along, but Jonathan has a great voice so I let him do it.
Catherine Howe
The monotypes were made with oil-based inks and R&F pigment sticks on Arnhem 1618 paper (“Flower Float” and “H.M.”) and handmade Khadi paper (“Black Garden D.E.”). Each unique print is signed and titled in pencil by the artist. Published by and produced at Manneken Press, the works are available for purchase. Contact Manneken Press for pricing and availability.
above: “Flower Float No. 10″, 2026. Trace monotype on Arnhem 1618 paper. 30″ x 22”.
above: “Black Garden D.E. No 4″, 2026. Monotype in chromatic black ink with silver pigment additions on handmade Khadi paper, 40.75″ x 28”.
About Catherine Howe
Catherine Howe (b. 1959, Buffalo, New York) is a New York–based painter whose lush, gestural works occupy the territory between representation and abstraction. Her paintings and monotypes combine fluid gestures, sensuous color, and experimental materials. The artist draws on seventeenth-century Dutch still life, baroque and rococo sensibilities, and postwar abstraction, pushing botanical imagery — flowers, fruit, and fauna — to the edge of dissolution, where forms break apart into flurries of brushwork, pours, scrapes, and shifting fields of interference mica pigment.
Howe earned a BFA at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an MFA in painting there in 1983. While in Buffalo she served as exhibitions curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the artist-run space founded by Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, before moving to New York in 1989 to become Associate Director of the alternative space White Columns, a position she held until 1995.
Her museum exhibitions include a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 (1990), “The Wayward Muse” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (1990), and the 43rd Biennial of American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1993). For roughly two decades she taught on the Graduate Painting Faculty of the New York Academy of Art and chaired the Academy’s Department of Critical Studies until 2021. Her work has been discussed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Times. She is represented by Winston Wächter Fine Art (NYC) and Von Lintel Gallery (Los Angeles) She lives and works in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.
Left: Catherine Howe at Manneken Press, 10/17/2026.
