From bullet holes to bumper stickers, New York mixed-media artist Nate Lowman balances humour with stark social and political commentary in works that appropriate objects, mass-media imagery, and contemporary icons.
Read MoreBorn in Las Vegas, Lowman was raised in Idyllwild, California and attended Idyllwild Arts Academy.
At age 15, the artist visited New York for a Cy Twombly exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1997, he returned to study a Bachelor of Science at New York University, graduating in 2001. During his studies, Lowman moonlighted as a security guard for Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea.
Today, he lives and works in New York City with Rachel Chandler, Nate Lowman's wife, and their children.
Exploring themes of violence, celebrity obsession, and climate change, Nate Lowman's paintings, collages, prints, sculpture, and installations scavenge art history, popular culture, and the news for poignant visual signifiers of our contemporary epoch.
Nate Lowman's bullet-hole works are an iconic early invention of the artist's seminal oeuvre. Several feature in the artist's first solo show, The End. And Other American Pastimes, at Maccarone, New York in 2005.
A motif that has endured throughout his contemporary art practice, Lowman's bullet holes have taken the form of graphic works and shaped canvases, appearing in a cartoonish, Pop-art style. Beyond the zany pop aesthetic, they reference the more sombre theme of gun violence.
Canvases that take the shape of their subject persist as a core element of Lowman's practice. Begun in 2013, Lowman's 'Maps' series presents quilt-like arrangements of U.S. states cut out from drop cloths and stitched together. Erratic paint splatters and stains across the canvas hint at the arbitrariness of borders.
Lowman's alkyd-on-canvas paintings are another staple of the artist's practice that emerged in the early 2000s. Lowman applies alkyd, a dense shiny paint, to the canvas in thick dots to create an effect reminiscent of repeated cycles of photocopying, typically seen in amateur posters, flyers, and zines.
Lowman's paintings between 2011 and 2012, based on Willem de Kooning's Marilyn Monroe (1954), are painted over with a layer of striated glossy black alkyd paint, adding this Xerox effect to the 1980s surfboard-style rendition of the subject.
One of several works that reference images of celebrity figures, Lowman is not, as Andy Warhol or de Kooning might have been, interested in the stars in the posters. Instead, as he explains to Art in America, 'I'm more interested in other peoples' interest ...' Nate Lowman's and Mary-Kate Olsen's short-lived relationship in late 2000 exposed the artist first-hand to this public obsession with celebrity that is his muse.
Utilising this Xerox technique in a more chilling series of works, Nate Lowman's David Zwirner show October 1, 2017 (2019) presented haunting painted reproductions of crime scene photographs taken from the hotel room at the centre of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. Given the Xerox blur effect from painting over the oil paint with black alkyd, the paintings in the show present a sense of removal from the actual scene. In these works, the artist seeks to capture and retain in history a moment of violence that rocked his hometown.
Much like his paintings, collages, and prints, Nate Lowman's gallery and outdoor installations utilise found material. In the installation The Never Ending Story (2007), the artist presents a series of derelict petrol pumps, making reference to the Iraq war and suspected economic motives.
Wet Pain (2008), a collaboration between Dan Colen and Nate Lowman, saw the temporary installation in Maccarone, New York of a trashed white 1971 Jaguar filled with a tangled mess of wires and playing the song 'Tequila' on a loop. In How to Redeem Your Towed Vehicle #1 (2009), a rusted component of a salvaged NYPD tow truck is inverted to make a crucifix. This humorously repurposed form resurfaces in several later works.
In a subtle reversal of his appropriations, Nate Lowman's Converse sneakers, made for luxury boutique Just One Eye, are comprised of fragments cut from one of his paintings. In 2012, he also collaborated with American fashion brand Supreme on a series of limited-edition t-shirts featuring the artist's trademark bullet holes.
Nate Lowman's art has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Nate Lowman: October 1, 2017, David Zwirner, London (2019); Nate Lowman: Before and After, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2017); Nate Lowman: I Wanted To Be An Artist But All I Got Was This Lousy Career, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2012); and Nate Lowman: The Natriot Act, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2009).
Group exhibitions include Third Dimension: Works from the Brant Foundation, The Brant Foundation, New York (2019); Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); Empire of Light, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2014); FRESH HELL, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, The New Museum, New York (2007); and Defamation of Character, MoMA PS1, New York (2006).
Nate Lowman's website can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
