NATE LOWMAN

Lowman’s new paintings combine a range of opposing registers of art history, culture, and meaning. Views of distinct golf courses, found by the artist from various photographic sources, from recent imagery to those documented in 1970s and ‘80s golfing monographs, are merged as composite images that confound any fixed point of view and create impossible perspectives on the plane of the canvas. Lowman heightens the highly designed, rendered artificiality of the golf courses by translating this placeless imagery into paint with striking color. The palette and the amorphous, rounded shapes of the manicured scenery, with its contrived sand traps and the curved contrasts between turf and grass, also recall nonrepresentational forms found in mid-twentieth-century abstract and surrealist art, further enhancing the hyperreal otherworldliness of the non-landscapes they depict.

Among the works on view will be a new, large-scale bronze sculpture by Lowman that combines a freestanding outline of a life-size snowman, with a cut-out void in the shape of a grandfather clock. The composite motif of these nesting anthropomorphic forms has been explored in prior paintings by the artist, here presenting a playful counterpoint to traditional monumental figurative sculptures. Also included in the exhibition will be paintings that similarly evoke an absent, figural, or narrative presence. These include a painting that features a snapshot of a sofa; the physical impression of a person who had been on it evocatively remains visible in the indentations of its cushions. Other shaped canvases that employ different motifs—a wing from an Edvard Munch angel; an open, empty violin case, an image Lowman sourced from the background of a Matisse painting; an egg and its shadow, rendered in black and white at a compressed, disorienting angle—further complicate, with poetic dissonance, the relationship between figuration and abstraction, painting and object, image and meaning.

Parking will be Lowman’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles since 2016. The exhibition follows the artist’s recent acclaimed exhibitions in 2022 at David Zwirner New York and in 2019 at David Zwirner London. David Zwirner Books recently released a monographic publication documenting these exhibitions, along with other recent work by the artist, that includes new writing by Lynne Tillman and Jim Lewis as well as an interview with Lowman by Andrew Paul Woolbright.

Nate Lowman (b. 1979) deftly mines images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, and installations. Since the early 2000s, the artist has continually pushed the boundaries of his multimedia approach with works that are by turns critical, humorous, political, and poetic. In his work, Lowman stages an encounter with commonplace, universally recognizable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process.

The artist’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, in 2018. Other solo presentations at public institutions include those at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2017); FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France (2016); Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2015); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2012); Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2009); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2006).

Lowman’s work has also been featured in significant group exhibitions including A Possible Horizon, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2020); Third Dimension: Works from The Brant Foundation, The Brant Foundation, New York (2019); Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); Second Chances, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015); Themes & Variations: The Empire of Light, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2014); Three Blind Mice, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2014); To Be with Art Is All We Ask, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2012); George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); The Luminous Interval: The D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2011); The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York (2010); Fresh Hell, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); and Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010).

In 2019, the artist joined David Zwirner and had his first solo presentation at the gallery’s London space later that year, followed by a solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2022. The artist lives and works in New York.

Work by Lowman is held in numerous institutional collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.