Ritter/Zamet is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the UK of New York artist, Nate Lowman.
Since participating in the No Platform Just a Trampoline exhibition at the Marcus Ritter gallery and subsequently being selected by Michele Maccarone for the Apexart Summer Program in New York in 2003, Nate Lowman’s work has been included in group exhibitions around the US at venues including Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Grant Selwyn Fine Art and David Zwirner Gallery. Earlier this year he both curated and participated in the exhibition, Let the Bullshit Run a Marathon, at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York and he was also included in the recent exhibition, The Mythological Machine at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry curated by Francesco Manacorda. Nate Lowman was also featured in Artforum’s First Take (January 2004) as one of the artists to watch during the year ahead.
Nate Lowman’s practice is based on an avid research into images that are then layered and recombined to create an intoxicating effect. By employing an endless variety of two-dimensional media to create subtle and allusive compositions on the wall surface, he elaborates and connects visual materials in order to foreground hidden narratives and identificatory systems that circulate in images in the public domain.
The visual material that he reworks are often well-known icons sedimented in our collective memory, the image repertoire that newspapers, television and the Internet force inside our imagination every day. In such a framework, media pictures can easily take on the roles of idols, and it is precisely this transformative process that catches Lowman’s attention. His ‘wall collages’ merge the taxonomic impulse to collect consistent material with a pleasure in visual metonymies. If at first glance the connections between the pictures might seem to be a rhetorical device, closer inspection reveals a peculiarly fluctuating emotional mechanism that consolidates the visuals produced and edited by the media.
In London, Lowman will show his recently completed wall piece This Career Idea, a meditation on the obscure flipside of young heroes’ fame. Inasmuch as we invest our emotive charge in them as positive models for the ego, a perverse reversion happens when they fall into disgrace, and a negative, perhaps more dangerous identification takes place. The work equates, among many, the image of McCauley Culkin, recently arrested on drug charges, a Xerox image of Mark Thatcher with his all-women racing team, and a painting of Oliver North. A kaleidoscopic effect is obtained through a subtle web of associative links depicted through many different formats and media. In the painting Höhere Wesen befahlen, the artist references Sigmar Polke’s famous painting while addressing the recent US censorship of war images. Lowman has painted in the upper right corner of the canvas one of the infamously concealed images of American soldiers’ coffins wrapped in the Stars and Stripes flag.
Text by Francesco Manacorda
Since participating in the No Platform Just a Trampoline exhibition at the Marcus Ritter gallery and subsequently being selected by Michele Maccarone for the Apexart Summer Program in New York in 2003, Nate Lowman’s work has been included in group exhibitions around the US at venues including Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Grant Selwyn Fine Art and David Zwirner Gallery. Earlier this year he both curated and participated in the exhibition, Let the Bullshit Run a Marathon, at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York and he was also included in the recent exhibition, The Mythological Machine at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry curated by Francesco Manacorda. Nate Lowman was also featured in Artforum’s First Take (January 2004) as one of the artists to watch during the year ahead.
Nate Lowman’s practice is based on an avid research into images that are then layered and recombined to create an intoxicating effect. By employing an endless variety of two-dimensional media to create subtle and allusive compositions on the wall surface, he elaborates and connects visual materials in order to foreground hidden narratives and identificatory systems that circulate in images in the public domain.
The visual material that he reworks are often well-known icons sedimented in our collective memory, the image repertoire that newspapers, television and the Internet force inside our imagination every day. In such a framework, media pictures can easily take on the roles of idols, and it is precisely this transformative process that catches Lowman’s attention. His ‘wall collages’ merge the taxonomic impulse to collect consistent material with a pleasure in visual metonymies. If at first glance the connections between the pictures might seem to be a rhetorical device, closer inspection reveals a peculiarly fluctuating emotional mechanism that consolidates the visuals produced and edited by the media.
In London, Lowman will show his recently completed wall piece This Career Idea, a meditation on the obscure flipside of young heroes’ fame. Inasmuch as we invest our emotive charge in them as positive models for the ego, a perverse reversion happens when they fall into disgrace, and a negative, perhaps more dangerous identification takes place. The work equates, among many, the image of McCauley Culkin, recently arrested on drug charges, a Xerox image of Mark Thatcher with his all-women racing team, and a painting of Oliver North. A kaleidoscopic effect is obtained through a subtle web of associative links depicted through many different formats and media. In the painting Höhere Wesen befahlen, the artist references Sigmar Polke’s famous painting while addressing the recent US censorship of war images. Lowman has painted in the upper right corner of the canvas one of the infamously concealed images of American soldiers’ coffins wrapped in the Stars and Stripes flag.
Text by Francesco Manacorda