Reconciling the detritus of pop culture with an aim of interpreting things and making a dialogue with the audience, Nate Lowman transforms the “found” visual language that lies between personal and collective. His paintings conjoin techniques of collage and appropriation using the isolate images from popular and consumerist culture manipulated through contemporary mediums as graffiti, print media, and bumper stickers. Focusing on the critique of society issues such as the cult of celebrity, violence or exaggerated materiality, his work takes the shape of familiar things unified by the artist’s part-trash, part-classical aesthetic. His installations could be described as recently buried time capsules with transparent qualities of a diary but deprived of direct emotion. For a typical young artist who works in the frame of revisionist punk aesthetic that comments on culture, religion, and politics, Lowman creates surprisingly refined pieces that range from painting and collage to sculptures.
Lowman was born in 1979 in Las Vegas and grew up in Idyllwild, California, a town in the mountains above Palm Springs, in which his father ran a nonprofit art school. After he finished the High School in 1997, he moved to the east coast to attend New York University, at the same time working as a security guard at the Dia Art Foundation. Finishing his studies, he got his first studio in Bed-Stuy where he created numerous artworks inspired by 9/11 attack, including interesting wall collage dedicated to John Walker Lindt, young American sentenced to 20 years for his involvement with Taliban. It represented images of different long-bearded men, from his father and Jim Morrison to some weirdos and pedophiles. This work has attracted the attention of Don and Mera Rubell, collectors from Miami, who purchased everything the artists had created for $20,000, which was enough for him to quit his day job and completely dedicate to his creative expression.
Famous both as a neo-appropriation artist and a ringleader of the late-night downtown art crowd, Lowman uses collage and preemption, often of well-known elements such as bumper stickers and graffiti: “A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news. I just steal them or photograph them or repaint them, so they’ve already been talked about, already been consumed. I’m just reopening them to get at their second, third, or fourth meanings. It really comes down to language. I feel like the biggest failure of humans is miscommunication. We can’t communicate with each other – we can fight, we can kill, we can do those things well. Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.” It could be said that his artwork critiques a lifestyle of a modern day American, the cult of celebrity, material consumption, gun culture, and explore violence and decay of American culture. His art is influenced by Richard Prince and Cady Noland, and some of his large-scale works are created in collaboration with artist Dan Colen. His work has taken many forms, silkscreens of bullet holes, trashed cars, rusted gas-station pumps and smiley faces. Wet Pain (2008), an installation of a 1971 white Jaguar that had been effectively trashed, which was created with Colen, is a good example of a variety of mediums that he uses for his artworks. Works like Bullet Hole (2005), a silkscreen of a bullet hole rendered in a cartoonish Pop aesthetic, is a good example of Lowman’s creative practice. His smiley faces, that he took from various sources, putting them in new contexts, including a painting of O. J. Simpson’s signature which was made inspired by O.J. Simpson’s letter and signature, are another good example of his artistic practice.
His first solo show The End. And Other American Pastimes has been held at Maccarone Gallery, New York in 2005 and since then, Lowman has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Palazzo Grassi, Venice. After his four institutional one-person shows – Axis of Praxis (2006, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN), The Natriot Act (2009, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo), I Wanted To Be An Artist But All I Got Was This Lousy Career (2012, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, CT), and America Sneezes (2015, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX), Lowman continues to exhibit frequently in the United States and abroad.
Featured image: Nate Lowman portrait, 2009 – Image via interviewmagazine.com
All images copyright of N. Lowman
Year | Exhibition Title | Gallery/Museumn | Solo/Group |
---|---|---|---|
2016 | Shrines To Speed. Art And The Automobile: From The Minimal To The Postmodern | Leila Heller Gallery, New York City, NY | Group |
2016 | Nate Lowman - World of Interiors | Champagne-Ardenne, Reims | Solo |
2016 | Nate Lowman - Downtown Is A Construct | Massimo De Carlo London, London | Solo |
2015 | Sprayed - Works From 1929 To 2015 | Gagosian Gallery, London | Group |
2015 | Geometries On And Off The Grid: Art From 1950 To The Present | The Warehouse, Dallas, TX | Group |
2015 | Second Chances | Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO | Group |
2015 | Love for Three Oranges | Gladstone Gallery - Brussels, Brussels | Group |
2015 | Drip Drop Thud | McCabe Fine Art, Stockholm | Group |
2015 | The World is Made of Stories | Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo | Group |
2015 | Nate Lowman - America Sneezes | Dallas Contemporary, Dallas | Solo |
2014 | Weeping Atlas Cedar | Massimo de Carlo, London | Solo |
2014 | Rave The Painforest | Maccarone, NYC | Solo |
2012 | I Wanted To Be An Artist But All I Got Was This Lousy Career | Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich | Solo |
2012 | Swiss Cheese and The Doors | Massimo de Carlo, Milan | Solo |
2011 | Bed Bugs | Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York | Group |
2011 | 30 Million Dollar Smile mural | Triple A, Los Angeles | Solo |
2010 | Fill You with Holes | Carlson Gallery, London | Solo |
2010 | Come As You Are Again | Salon 94, New York | Group |
2010 | Skin Fruit: Selection from the Dakis Jounnou Collection | New Museum, New York | Group |
2010 | Fresh Hell | Palais De Tokyo, Paris | Group |
2010 | The Last Newspaper | New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York | Group |
2010 | Haunted: Contemporary Photography-Video-Performance, Solomon. R | Guggenheim Museum | Group |
2009 | Esquire’s Singular Suit | Somerset House, London | Group |
2009 | Beg Borrow and Steal | Rubell Family Collection, Miami | Group |
2009 | New York Minute: 60 Artisti della scena newyorchese | MACRO Future, Rome | Group |
2009 | Bande – Annonce | New Galerie de France, Paris | Group |
2009 | A Dog From Every County | Maccarone Gallery, New York | Solo |
2009 | Mapping the Studio | Palazzo Grassi, Venice | Group |
2009 | The Natriot Act, Nate Lowman | Astrup Fearnly Museey for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Sweden | Solo |
2008 | Sunshine | Rental Gallery, New York | Group |
2008 | Meet Me Round The Corner, works form the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Astrup Fearnley | Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo | Group |
2008 | Murder Letters | Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon | Group |
2008 | The Dead Lecturer | Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York | Solo |
2008 | Expenditure | The Busan Biennale, Busan | Group |
2007 | Carnegie Art Award 2006 | Den frie udstilling, Copenhagen | Group |
2007 | 2 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Moscow | Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow | Group |
2007 | Uncertain States of America | Herning Kunstmuseum, Herning | Group |
2007 | Dark Victory, Ileane Tounta Contemporary Art Centre, Athens | Group | |
2007 | Memorial to the Iraq War | ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts London | Group |
2007 | Prague Biennale 3 | Prague Biennale, Prague | Group |
2007 | Fractured Figure: Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Deste Foundation | Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens | Group |
2007 | Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st century | New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York | Group |
2007 | Uncertain States of America | Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague | Group |
2006 | Found | Bortolami Dayan, New York | Group |
2006 | Mangoes | Peres Projects, Los Angeles | Group |
2006 | Denial is a River | Sculpture Center, Long Island | Group |
2006 | Seriality Part II | Rubell Family Collection, Miami | Group |
2006 | Down by Law | The Wrong Gallery at the Whitney Biennial 2006, New York | Group |
2006 | Survivor | Bortolami Dayan, New York | Group |
2006 | The Studio Visit | EXIT ART, New York | Group |
2005 | Greater New York | P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York | Group |
2005 | Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium | Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway | Group |
2005 | Trade | Whitecolumns, New York | Group |
2004 | Capitals and Constructs | Year, New York | Group |
2004 | Nate Lowman | Ritter-Zamet, London | Solo |
2004 | The Mythological Machine | Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry | Group |
2004 | Let the Bullshit Run a Marathon | Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York | Group |
2004 | Drunk vs. Stoned | Gavin Brown’s Enterprise at Passerby, New York | Group |
2004 | Power, Corruption, and Lies | Roth Horowitz, New York | Group |
2004 | Happy Days Are Here Again | David Zwirner, New York | Group |
2004 | I Love Music | Creative Growth Gallery, San Francisco | Group |
2003 | A Matter of Facts | Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York | Group |
2003 | Foreplay | Ritter-Zamet, London | Group |
2003 | Group Show | Marcus Ritter, New York | Group |
2003 | Airtight Plan For Killing | Buia Gallery, New York | Group |
2003 | No platform just a trampoline | Marcus Ritter, New York | Group |