Nate Lowman
Paper Merapi, 2021
Oil on paper
22 1/2 x 30 inches
57.2 x 76.2 cm
Framed: 24 7/8 x 32 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches
63.2 x 82.6 x 4.4 cm
Signed and dated recto
$35,000
Framed
Blurb
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 features a depiction of a found photograph from the news media, taken at night in 2014, of Mount Merapi, an active stratovolcano located in Java, Indonesia, that has erupted regularly since 1548. Among Lowman's first works on paper, the work relates to a painting based on the same image (Stratovolcano [Merapi], 2021). In the present work, the graphic quality of the image is further enhanced by drawing. 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 the sky and terrain 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.
The present work features a depiction of a found photograph from the news media, taken at night in 2014, of Mount Merapi, an active stratovolcano located in Java, Indonesia, that has erupted regularly since 1548. Among Lowman's first works on paper, the work relates to a painting based on the same image (Stratovolcano [Merapi], 2021). In the present work, the graphic quality of the image is further enhanced by drawing. 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 the sky and terrain 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.
