Nate Lowman’s creative process revolves around the re-invention and resurrection of visual tropes and symbols of mass culture. Drawing inspiration from the Pop Art movement of the 1960s that exposed the underlying darkness of post-war American culture, Lowman expands the preoccupation with a modern day edge: ‘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’. (Private Lives: Nate Lowman, 2012) Exploring the history of his homeland the artist states: ‘America's built on violence...it's all manifest destiny; it's totally brutal.'
The present lot focuses on this sense of controversy and violence. It forms part of the continuing series Bullet Holes, in which the artist highlights the bullet hole as symbol of the American preoccupation with the commerciality of criminality. It’s matrices of ink-coloured dots and expanding composition is reminiscent of the work of Roy Lichtenstein. Through the re-appropriation of this image and representational technique, Lowman unveils the wider cultural obsession with violence emerging from gun and gang culture.
The large scale canvas enables a co-operation between medium and subject matter. The evocation of the shot of the gun can be seen in the commanding size of the piece, imposing and reflective of a moment of dramatic impact. The amplification of the sound is represented in the expanding cloak of dots that emerge from the void, lending the piece an added dimensionality in the comparison of depths. Thus both physically and psychologically escaping the constraints of the traditional picture frame, the present lot explores the distinction between destruction and creation. ‘A lot of my art is about violence and crime. I also really like shaped canvases. I’ve always loved Ellsworth Kelly, I love all the Brazilians, the Neo concrete People like Lygia Clark. I always wanted to make these shaped canvas objects but I didn’t want to make a Blinky Palermo with jagged edges; I wanted to make something else. The bullet holes were a good opportunity to have the cultural things that I’m interested in come together with that.’ (Nate Lowman, Bad Day Magazine, 2009)
