Alex Howey
BA painting
Edinburgh College of Art
Specialisms: Painting / Art Curation / Writing for the Arts
Location: Glasgow, United Kingdom
Alex Howey
First Name: Alex
Last Name: Howey
Specialisms: Painting / Art Curation / Writing for the Arts
Sectors:
My Location: Glasgow, United Kingdom
University / College: Edinburgh College of Art
Course / Program Title: BA painting
About
Alex Howey (b. 2002, Northumberland) is an emerging contemporary artist born and raised in the North-East, currently based in Glasgow, working predominantly in oil painting. Alex Howey’s practice cultivates queer, shape-shifting worlds where fluid bodies defy norms, exposing the contradictions of gender, desire, and identity in a landscape of surreal resistance and joy.
Alex has exhibited in a range of group and solo exhibitions across Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. They have exhibited recently at the Royal Over-Seas League in London, Summerhall in Edinburgh and at House Arts Collective in Glasgow. They are a recent graduate from BA Painting at Edinburgh College of Art, and are currently undertaking a Masters' in Curatorial Practice at Glasgow School of Art in which they received a scholarship to study. In 2025, they were shortlisted for the Astaire Art Prize, the Arts to Hearts Artist of the Year award and as an RBA Rising Star.
Alex Howey’s work conjures worlds where gender is a fluid action rather than a fixed state, depicting queerness as a perpetual metamorphosis. Rooted in androgyny and defiance, their figures drift through liminal realms shaped by linseed oil’s slippery autonomy. In this friction between softness and surface, Howey lays bare the contradictions of gender and desire: tender, unyielding, forged yet ephemeral. Through the embrace of filmic fragmentation, disembodiment, and nonlinear storytelling, they tend a landscape where queer bodies erupt, detach, and reassemble in resistance to dominant norms. Drawing from nomadic queer cultures and rural living, they craft satirical yet unsettling worlds reflecting post-climate change realities. Drawing from Old Masters, Howey reimagines historical depictions through a queer lens, resisting victimhood and celebrating joy, absurdity, and gender performativity. Howey’s work envisions liberated futures – worlds caught between destruction and renewal – these heterotopias becoming sites of satire and joy, where absurdity meets critique, and liberation grows from the soil of conflict.