Nate Lowman - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, May 16, 2013 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Maccarone, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I make images from things I find serendipitously. I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”
    NATE LOWMAN, 2012

    The work of Nate Lowman is an emotional exploration of American culture. With its matrices of ink dots and a shape reminiscent of an action burst, Escalade, 2005-07, gives a nod to Pop art icon Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-style paintings. While Lichtenstein’s bursts of action are indicative of an attraction to the impact of commercial printing, Lowman’s bullet hole imagery instead evokes a façade of tough guy machismo. Lowman’s eye-catching iconography is no less a visually communicative explosive force. Sourced from trompe-l’oeil stickers of bullet holes meant to be applied to the glass of car windows, Lowman’s bullet holes conjured up notions of urban masculinity, menace and aggression.

    Through reappropriation, Lowman unveils the wider cultural obsession with violence emerging from gun and gang culture. Lowman’s salient source material for Escalade, 2005-07, reveals a fresh sociological study on this particular subset of society as well as the desensitization to violent events. Lowman embraces a sense of delinquency in his imagery, imbuing it with irony at the culturally absurd. Thematically guided by themes of commerce, death and desire, he presents his own version of twenty-first century Americana. Lowman’s Escalade, 2005-07 transforms the detritus of pop culture with formal intensity into an indelible high water mark of the art of today.

2

Escalade

2005-07
silkscreen ink and acrylic on canvas
71 x 60 in. (180.3 x 152.4 cm.)

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $545,000

Contact Specialist
Zach Miner
Head of Sale
zminer@phillips.com
+1 212 940 1256

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York 16 May 2013 7pm