Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Nate Lowman

SELECTED WORKS BY Nate Lowman

Nate Lowman
This Marilyn

2011

Oil and alkyd on linen

198.4 x 83.8 cm

ARTICLES

Nate Lowman
by Leo Fitzpatrick, Interview Magazine

He used to cover gallery walls with bullet holes. But he’s ¬traded in the gun for a smiley face. Has the bad boy artist finally gone soft? Or is the smiley face smiling about something weird and terrible?
Leo Fitzpatrick attempted to interview Nate Lowman twice before they finally got it right. The first time was rushed. The second time they got way too wasted and spent most of the exchange looking at YouTube videos in the downtown New York City studio Lowman shares with fellow artist Dan Colen. (Sample of transcript: LF: hat’s the guy I’m going to grow up to be. I’m gonna turn into that guy one day, trying to sell Winnebagos on TV but forgetting his lines, and he freaks out and goes, “Fuck everything.”) The third time they met a little more soberly and managed to get to the bottom of Lowman’s series of smiley-face paintings and drawings that he’s making for his solo show this month at New York’s maccarone gallery. The new subject matter is a bit of a departure, since the 30-year-old artist’s previous work has involved screen-printed bullet holes and ironic bumper stickers turned into devious linguistic assaults. Fitzpatrick and Lowman are, in fact, very close friends, and they can often be found deejaying together at various clubs around the city. If you ever run into either of these guys in the morning, it usually means they’ve been up all night working.
LEO FITZPATRICK: What attempt are we on now?
NATE LOWMAN: This is the third time, which will be the charm.
LF: A lot of people probably think it’s easy for two friends to get together and do an interview. Is it hard for you to talk about your work?

NL: Yeah, it’s hard. The work is on your mind so much that when someone asks you to talk about it, it’s like, “Which part?” I have all these scribbles of smiley faces in my studio that friends do when they come over—yourself included. Try to explain that project to people. I’m afraid the more I talk about it and try to make sense of it in my mind, the more I’ll jinx it. My friend Jeff Elrod once saw a painting in his head, and then he couldn’t make it. We used to share a studio, and he did these abstract paintings with tape and flat colors, and sometimes he’d be like, “Oh, I know what the painting’s going to look like, so I don’t need to make it. I know it’s a great painting.” He had it in his head, and it was never going to leave, and he got to live with it. I was always like, “Dude, just do it anyway.” It was like he didn’t want to get bored by his own ideas so he didn’t go through with them. I do that too, but think about how ungenerous that is. All you have is this secret, and nobody else gets to share it.

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Source:interviewmagazine.com

Nate Lowman Interview
February 10, 2011, by ARTINFO

We're happy to introduce our new "ARTINFO Questionnaire" feature, in which we quiz artists, dealers, and assorted movers and shakers about how they inhabit the art world — from what shows they're seeing, to their post-gallery watering holes, to the books on their bedside table.

Age: 32
Occupation: Artist
City/Neighborhood: Tribeca, Manhattan
What project are you working on now? I'm doing a joint exhibition at Maccarone Gallery and Gavin Brown's Enterprise that opens in April.
What's the last show that you saw? Agathe Snow's "All Access World" at the Guggenheim Deutsch Bank in Berlin and Dan Colen's "Peanuts" at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo
What's the last show that surprised you? George Condo at the New Museum
Why? What took so long?
What's your favorite place to see art? Anywhere other than the Internet
Do you make a living off your art? Yes
What's the most indispensable item in your studio? The windows
Where are you finding ideas for your work these days? The library, the street, the periodicals, conversations, the time between the night and the morning
Do you collect anything? Almost everything
What's the last artwork you purchased? "Conscious B-Side" by Tony Cox
What's the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery? I've seen some weird decisions regarding cosmetic surgery and some weird financial transactions.
What's your art-world pet peeve? The professionalization of young artists
What's your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant? I like the Smile on Bond Street in New York.
What's the last great book you read? "Ghosts" by Cesar Aira
What work(s) of art do you wish you owned? I've always loved Isa Genzken's "Fuck the Bauhaus" series of sculptures from 2000. They really inspired me when I was an art student.
What would you do to get them? They belong in a museum where someone looks after them.
What international art destination do you most want to visit? The Instituto Inhotim in Brazil looks really interesting.
What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about? Lizzi Bougatsos and Andrew Kuo are two hugely under-appreciated artists.
Who's your favorite living artist? RIP Dennis Oppenheim

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Source:artinfo.com

Nate Lowman
by Morgan Falconer, Frieze Magazine

Nate Lowman may be waving or he may be drowning in his new solo show at Maccarone. The very first work to greet us condenses his uncertainty: To be titled (Red No Smoking Smiley) (2009) combines a smiley face motif with a circular no-smoking symbol – we’re ordered not to smile.
This is only the second solo exhibition by the young New York-based artist, which may seem surprising given his visibility: Lowman’s occasional outings as a curator led him to co-curate the well-received ‘Summer Group Show’ at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue space in 2007, while his outings by night still land him in the gossip press. For those familiar with Lowman’s tastes as a curator, the Maccarone exhibition is no surprise: he could be the unhappy offspring of Richard Prince and Mike Kelley – a foul-tempered, sniggering child, dirty-minded and fascinated with death. Paintings of tombstones (that look like degraded screenprints) recur throughout the show, bearing the names of unfortunates like Loser, Spanks and Virgin. Country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and his teen star daughter Miley, the latter captured rather too intimately in last year’s notorious Vanity Fair photo shoot, appear faintly in another work.

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Source:frieze.com

Friends with Benefits, Nate Lowman in Hydra
August, 2011, by Kevin McGarry, New York Times

For the 11th year in a row, the London-based collector Pauline Karpidas is hosting over 100 guests on the small Greek island of Hydra to view the latest additions to her Ophiuchus Collection: 70 new paintings and a sculpture of a tombstone by the New York artist Nate Lowman that are on display in Karpidas’s gallery, Hydra Workshop.
The redoubtable London art dealer Sadie Coles has once again organized the event, which attracted an international mix of collectors, dealers, artists and a dozen or so of Lowman’s closest friends.

Lowman’s new portraits are actually of his friends, including Mary-Kate Olsen, Clarissa Dalrymple, Hanna Liden, Dan Colen, Adam McEwen, Agathe Snow and, of course, Karpidas herself. According to Lowman, the paintings are mostly based on photographs originally taken by his acquaintances, about a third of them by the British photographer and Hydra regular Johnny Shand-kydd. (I contributed several photographs as well, and Lowman’s portrait of me was based on a photograph taken last year in Montauk, N.Y., by my friend Dash Snow.)
Lowman, 30, first exhibited on the island four years ago as a part of a group show at Dimitrios Antonitsis’s Hydra School Project. Of his nearest-and-dearest approach, he says: “Pauline gave me no guidelines or restrictions so I decided to paint anyone who might show up.”

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Source:nytimes.com