Nate Lowman (b. 1979) has become known for deftly mining images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, and installations. Since the early 2000s, the artist has continually pushed the boundaries of his multimedia approach 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. Having amassed a visual archive of source material, Lowman often processes the significance of images over time, typically returning to a picture on several occasions before making it the subject of one of his multivalent works. "The artist's sociological impulse," as art critic David Rimanelli notes, "[is] to research and catalogue a world that is, for all its immediacy, more customarily, and more comfortably, seen at a distance."¹

The present work belongs to a group of paintings and related works on paper (his first works on paper to date), a selection of which the artist debuted in 2021 in a focused presentation at The Armory Show, New York. Lowman draws from disparate sources: photographs of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test explosions in the 1940s and 50s and US drones flying above Pakistan in the early 2000s (as in the present work, which shows an image from an ongoing conflict the US has engaged with for decades), depictions of volcanic eruptions, Rorschach blots, and otherwise seemingly benign stock media and advertising imagery. He examines, in his characteristically layered and nuanced approach, a sense of poetic dissonance that evokes both optimism and the sublime, while acknowledging the darker undercurrents of popular media and art-historical imagery.

To capture the terrain surrounding the drone, and the graphic quality of the image, instead of employing an overlay of characteristic dotted blown-up xerox-like patterning that is otherwise common to his practice, here, Lowman overlays the painted image with a projection of a hand-drawn sketch of the photograph, demarcating its darker areas with gestural, scribble-like shading and markings. As such, the work explores the tensions at play between drawing, painting, and photography, while also pointing to pop art and abstraction, the two dominant idioms of twentieth-century painting.

¹David Rimanelli, "Nate Lowman: The Brant Foundation Art Study Center," Artforum (May 2013), p. 332.