Few artists inhabit their artistic life more fully than Nate Lowman. His studio in Tribeca, which doubles as an apartment, is filled with art and ephemera. A towel carries the impression, Turin Shroud-like, of a pair of damp jeans; paint-splattered canvases are taped to the floor; a closet is stacked with old gas-pump panels that will be on show at publisher Peter Brant’s Connecticut barn turned art gallery this month.
Lowman, 33, is affiliated with a group of New York artists once dubbed Warhol’s Children. Linked by attitude (irreverent, punky) and shared interests (skateboarding, graffiti), Lowman and his peers—Dan Colen, Leo Fitzpatrick, photographer Ryan McGinley, and the late Dash Snow—achieved notoriety early in their careers for bringing downtown nonconformity to the art mainstream.
Lowman’s specialty is reconciling the detritus of pop culture—an effort that’s about participation in a flawed system, not a rejection of it. “I don’t have a great imagination to share something with you that you don’t know, so it’s about interpreting things—a dialogue,” he explains.
Lowman’s work takes the shape of smiley faces, magnetized bullet holes, and Arbre Magique air fresheners. The images he gathers often come from the news cycle or the crime blotter (distressed blondes in general, among them Nicole Brown, murdered former wife of O. J. Simpson; “More or Less,” a 2003 show at Apex Art, featured bearded men such as John Walker Lindh, Jim Morrison, and Che Guevara), and he re-purposes “found” language that lies awkwardly between personal and impersonal, like the bumper sticker jesus would use the turn signal, asshole.
Making art with political or philosophical leaning can be problematic for a market that is, as he says, about hyper-capitalism, in which artworks can become a way to keep score in an unregulated financial game—“poker chips for billionaires.” “It’s a shame when other people’s gambling habits change the meaning of paintings,” he says, “or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it’s too expensive to be interesting or moving. That’s when I get bummed out.”
Lowman’s material and themes are unified by his part-trash, part-classical aesthetic. “I make images from things I find serendipitously. I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it. It could be from a newspaper, on the street. It could be something I fell over.”
Over the past two years, Lowman, who grew up near Palm Springs, has staged successful exhibitions in New York and Rome, and concluded a widely publicized dalliance with an Olsen twin (Mary-Kate).
At the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, he plans to exhibit 10 gas-pump panels (nine authentic and one painted facsimile), which he finds anthropomorphic and melancholic, plus several large-scale air fresheners, paintings made on studio drop cloths, a tow-truck boom that resembles a primitive holy cross, paintings from his “Trash Landing Marilyn” series, and digital prints of oil rigs named after Dynasty stars. For an art star who is relatively reserved, the show is a chance for a kind of synthesis. “It’s an awesome opportunity,” he says. “I’m not treating it as a retrospective but like a new show. It’s a forward-leaning gesture, not a look back.”
