Nate Lowman - Lewis, Jim

. .

Résumé :
A stunning, focused document of Nate Lowman’s work from the past four years

“Brewing the good, the bad, and the ugly of consumerist modern life in his masterful paintings, Lowman draws a portrait of the times that is equally mischievous and somber.” —BOMB Magazine

With an archive of source material amassed and processed over time, Lowman creates slippery, layered images that transform visual referents found in the news, media, and art history. In this volume, Lowman plays with cataclysmic imagery that probes the tensions between the everyday and the extreme, presence and absence, and violence and representation. In his vibrant paintings of digitally rendered hurricane imagery and crime scene photography cataloging the aftermath of the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, he considers the physicality of his medium in connection to the chaos of his subject matter.

Spotlighting Lowman’s exhibitions at David Zwirner in London and New York along with other recent work, this monograph includes a text by Lynne Tillman that provides a unique perspective across all bodies of Lowman’s oeuvre. In an interview with Andrew Paul Woolbright for The Brooklyn Rail, Lowman discusses his engagement with representation and meaning, twentieth-century gestural and pop art, slow painting, and American violence.

Biographie:
New York–based artist Nate Lowman (b. 1979) deftly mines mass-produced images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, collages, prints, and installations. Since the early 2000s, Lowman has continually pushed the boundaries of language and object making with works that are at turns political, humorous, and poetic. Through his art—which dynamically explores themes of representation, celebrity, obsession, and violence—Lowman stages an encounter with commonplace, universally recognizable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process. He lives and works in New York.

Lynne Tillman writes novels, including, most recently, Men and Apparitions (2018); short stories, including the collection The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016); and essays and art and cultural criticism, including contributions to exhibition catalogues Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (2018) and Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work (2017) and publications such as Aperture and Frieze magazines. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing, and was awarded The Katherine Anne Porter Prize by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her book-length autobiographical essay, Mothercare, was published in 2022 by Soft Skull Press. Tillman is a professor and writer in residence in the English department of the University at Albany. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra. 

Andrew Paul Woolbright is an artist, critic, and curator working in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to exhibiting his own work, he is a critic and contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail, and is the director of the gallery Below Grand on the Lower East Side. Woolbright is an MFA graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently teaches at Pratt Institute and The School of Visual Arts in New York.

Jim Lewis is the author of four novels, which have been translated into many languages: Sister (1993), Why the Tree Loves the Ax (1998), The King Is Dead (2003), and Ghosts of New York (2021). He has written extensively on the visual arts, including contributions to some thirty museum and gallery monographs, and he has published criticism, essays, and all manner of reportage for Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and Wired, among other outlets.