James Howell - Infinite Array

James Howell: Infinite Array was a short exhibition of the American painter's work at Bartha Contemporary, 7 Ledbury Mews North, Notting Hill, London, in November 2021, with a private view on 17 November and a closing date of 27 November. It marked the launch of Infinite Array, a monograph on Howell published by CIRCA Press with a text by Professor Alistair Rider.

Howell (1935 to 2014) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived and worked in New York. He studied literature at the University of Washington in Seattle and then art and architecture at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. For more than five decades he worked with fine gradations of grey. He moved to New York in 1992, and in the 1990s his Series 10 explored grey alongside his interests in mathematics, physics and philosophy. Howell named 'light, spaciousness, mystical influence, movement' and 'the ideas of simplicity, sparsity, subtlety' as essential to his work.

His work is held by the Albright-Knox Art Museum in Buffalo, the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, among other collections. In 2022 the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop showed Howell's paintings in the context of Albers's work.