Nate Lowman Exhibition Announcement

The  Brant  Foundation  is  pleased  to  announce its Nate Lowman Exhibition,  I Wanted to be an Artist but all I got was this Lousy Career.  The  exhibition   will   feature   recent   and   new   work   including   paintings, collage and sculpture and continues through March  2013.

Dusted  with  mythological  fear,  loathing,  and  spiritual  desertification,  Nate  Lowman’s   work  cuts  up  and  reassembles  the  movies,  the  street,  history,  and  the  news.  From  a   bank  teller  window  shot  through  with  bullets,  to  black  crucifixes  modeled  on  New   York  City  tow  truck  equipment,  to  blonde,  spectral  Marilyn,  scarred  and  bloodied  by   de  Kooning’s  violent  brushstrokes,  Lowman  gravitates  toward  crimes,  absurdities,   slip-ups,  tragedies,  travesties,  laughing  stocks,  write-offs,  and  disasters.  “People  treat   images  the  same  way  that  they  treat  vacation,”  he  says.  “I’m  trying  not  to  be  a  tourist   all  the  time  –  or  at  least  not  concerning  the  interpretation  of  information.”

Functioning  like  “membranes”  –  as  Sherrie  Levine  once  described  her  own  works   made  from  appropriated  images  –  “permeable  from  both  sides  so  there  is  an  easy   flow  between  the  past  and  the  future,  between  my  history  and  yours,”*  Lowman’s   work  weaves  public  history  with  personal  memory,  with  the  result  that  we  feel  a   strange  familiarity  in  looking  over  his  bikini  postcards,  magazine  clippings,  bumper   stickers,   bullethole   decals,   car   air   freshener   trees,   and   smiley   faces,   as   if   being   reminded  of  something  we  already  know.

Spread  in  alkyd  dots  across  a  canvas,  torn  from  a  tabloid,  found  on  the  sidewalk,   pasted   to  the   fridge,   buried   in   a   shoebox:   in   Lowman’s   artistic   system,   available   images  and  the  messages  they  contain  are  reprogrammed  as  expressive  tools  and   keyed  into  art  history.  His  technique  involves  themes  and  indexes  –  chairs,  people   pointing  at  or  holding  things,  swiss  cheese  –  he  has  a  taste  for  the  derelict  –  battered   and   broken  doors   from   the  refuse   heap,   flattened  aluminum   cans,   chewing  gum,   rusted  gas  pumps  like  those  at  abandoned  gas  stations,  passed  at  high  speed  on   obsolescent  highways  –  and  he  mingles  these  souvenirs  of  the  recently  bygone  with   signs  that  the  end  is  near  –  ripe  crops  covered  in  snow,  x-rayed  truckfuls  of  human   traffic,  flooded  suburbs,  a  smiling  ice  cream  cone  announcing  I’ll  Be  Dead  Soon.

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