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Lot Essay
Over the past decade, Nate Lowman has become one of the leading figures on the international contemporary art scene. His paintings, sculptures, and installations have an immediacy that stylistically and conceptually evokes the present through using and reusing imagery from the mass media, art history, and his surroundings in New York.
While Lowman's practice conjures a previous generation's appropriation strategies-drawing, in particular, on artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, and Cady Noland-his oeuvre possesses a strong narrative dimension, which his predecessors eschewed. Lowman's choice of source materials-typically newspaper cuttings of disasters or high-profile personalities-says as much about the news stories and sensational events they reference as they reflect the artist's own background and subjectivities.
Lowman's installations exemplify this conflation of social commentary and personalized narrative. In More or Less (2003), the artist presented a disjointed selection of male portraits, mostly of well-known figures but also including his father, against a wide wall, the only denominator being that the individuals sported a beard. Many of the images were photocopies and often cropped, making the portraits difficult to discern. The juxtapositions thus offered a subtle comment on individual "signifiers" and their shifting, contextual meanings. The work forms a poignant contrast to a recent, recurring motif within Lowman's work: the "smiley face"-the ubiquitous, iconic symbol of happiness, which he employs in various guises that echo its inconsequential, empty effect.
In the present work, Birthday Cake Painting #2 (2011), Lowman delivers two American flags layered atop one another. The motif is based on a newspaper photograph of a cake made for a Fourth of July celebration and forms part of a wider project by the artist in which he selects images from various papers on a weekly basis. The brightly-colored flag is painted over by a dotted layer of black alkyd depicting a larger flag, which looks almost abstract. Although hand-painted, Lowman's technique creates the appearance of newsprint, thus providing a self-referential dimension to the work. While an earlier painting of the same motif, which was on view at the New Museum in New York last year (as part of the installation Black and White and Read All Over, 2010), featured the two flags neatly overlapping, the disjointed flags in the present work hint at larger and more abstract inconsistencies at play.
Describing Lowman's aesthetic, Gunnar B. Kvaran, Director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo where the artist had his first museum solo show in 2009, notes that "it's an art of selecting, curating, orchestrating, manipulating." He continues: "Lowman displays a stronger, clearer political commitment than most artists' of the previous generation. An acute sense of injustice often reveals itself in his layered narratives. There is no innocence or ambiguity in these works, noticeable both from his manner of presenting the images and from their content. But the overall mood is rarely an outrageous one, rather one of sadness or pessimism, mixed with sarcasm and dark humor. In fact one can say that the aesthetic, formal aspects of the works introduce a perception of darkness and melancholia more than inciting anger."1
1 Gunnar B. Kvaran, "The Natriot Act," Nate Lowman, Exh. cat. (Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, 2009), p. 15 and p. 17
Born in 1979 in Las Vegas, Nate Lowman received his B.S. from New York University in 2001.
Lowman has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions, most recently in 2011 with a two-venue solo show at Gavin Brown's enterprise and Maccarone in New York. His first museum solo exhibition was organized by the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, in 2009. The artist's work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions worldwide, most recently in 2011 at institutions including the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other important group exhibitions include Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York (both 2010); Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice (2009); Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York (2005); and Uncertain States of America, which was first on view in 2005 at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, and traveled to various venues, including the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; Reykjavik Art Museum (all 2006); Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; and the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (all 2007).
Works by Lowman are represented in prominent collections internationally, including the François Pinault Foundation, Venice; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; among others. He lives and works in New York.
While Lowman's practice conjures a previous generation's appropriation strategies-drawing, in particular, on artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, and Cady Noland-his oeuvre possesses a strong narrative dimension, which his predecessors eschewed. Lowman's choice of source materials-typically newspaper cuttings of disasters or high-profile personalities-says as much about the news stories and sensational events they reference as they reflect the artist's own background and subjectivities.
Lowman's installations exemplify this conflation of social commentary and personalized narrative. In More or Less (2003), the artist presented a disjointed selection of male portraits, mostly of well-known figures but also including his father, against a wide wall, the only denominator being that the individuals sported a beard. Many of the images were photocopies and often cropped, making the portraits difficult to discern. The juxtapositions thus offered a subtle comment on individual "signifiers" and their shifting, contextual meanings. The work forms a poignant contrast to a recent, recurring motif within Lowman's work: the "smiley face"-the ubiquitous, iconic symbol of happiness, which he employs in various guises that echo its inconsequential, empty effect.
In the present work, Birthday Cake Painting #2 (2011), Lowman delivers two American flags layered atop one another. The motif is based on a newspaper photograph of a cake made for a Fourth of July celebration and forms part of a wider project by the artist in which he selects images from various papers on a weekly basis. The brightly-colored flag is painted over by a dotted layer of black alkyd depicting a larger flag, which looks almost abstract. Although hand-painted, Lowman's technique creates the appearance of newsprint, thus providing a self-referential dimension to the work. While an earlier painting of the same motif, which was on view at the New Museum in New York last year (as part of the installation Black and White and Read All Over, 2010), featured the two flags neatly overlapping, the disjointed flags in the present work hint at larger and more abstract inconsistencies at play.
Describing Lowman's aesthetic, Gunnar B. Kvaran, Director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo where the artist had his first museum solo show in 2009, notes that "it's an art of selecting, curating, orchestrating, manipulating." He continues: "Lowman displays a stronger, clearer political commitment than most artists' of the previous generation. An acute sense of injustice often reveals itself in his layered narratives. There is no innocence or ambiguity in these works, noticeable both from his manner of presenting the images and from their content. But the overall mood is rarely an outrageous one, rather one of sadness or pessimism, mixed with sarcasm and dark humor. In fact one can say that the aesthetic, formal aspects of the works introduce a perception of darkness and melancholia more than inciting anger."
Born in 1979 in Las Vegas, Nate Lowman received his B.S. from New York University in 2001.
Lowman has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions, most recently in 2011 with a two-venue solo show at Gavin Brown's enterprise and Maccarone in New York. His first museum solo exhibition was organized by the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, in 2009. The artist's work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions worldwide, most recently in 2011 at institutions including the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other important group exhibitions include Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York (both 2010); Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice (2009); Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York (2005); and Uncertain States of America, which was first on view in 2005 at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, and traveled to various venues, including the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; Reykjavik Art Museum (all 2006); Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; and the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (all 2007).
Works by Lowman are represented in prominent collections internationally, including the François Pinault Foundation, Venice; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; among others. He lives and works in New York.