Nate Lowman collects and transforms the detritus of contemporary American life, re-evaluating familiar signs and symbols from print and electronic media, as well as from the street, home and studio. In space, his oil and acrylic paintings resemble something of a hybrid of a fuzzy Xerox image and a new tattoo, while his depictions of pop culture characters, such as Marilyn Monroe and Nicole Brown Simpson, act as unlikely hieroglyphs, defending the mythologies that have accumulated around them. While Lowman's impulses oscillate between additive and subtractive, print technologies and mass media take on the intimacy (and mortality) of the flesh.
Never Remember – the title of the exhibition is a biting reversal of the slogan “Never forget” – takes place in the same gallery where Jasper Johns' paintings were shown thirty years earlier. Lowman's maps expand on his shaped canvases, begun in the early 2000s, depicting scrawled hearts, trompe l'oeil of bullet holes, and room-freshening trees. However, while those earlier works reflected on the printed image, the maps explore the effects of chance, gesture and history, merging irregular splatters and smears with allusions to American quiltmaking, pop art and politics. The works are produced by cutting fragments of studio fabrics in the form of individual states and combining them. For medium and small maps, the states are first stitched together with a nautical-grade zigzag stitch and then stretched over canvas backings to form the general outline of the continental United States. Untitled (2013-15), the largest map in the exhibition, is composed of fifty states on individually stretched canvases, each hung in proper geographical relationship to the rest, with subtle gaps between the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.
As well as being practical tools for navigation, maps are windows into the construction of knowledge itself, revealing the political, religious and personal factors at play as humanity seeks to represent space and time, themselves and each other. Generations of artists have tapped into the conceptual and aesthetic power of mapping, from the medieval mappa mundi to Alighiero Boetti's embroidered maps made in active collaboration with Afghan artisans, representing shifting subjectivities with respect to the world order.
Gagosian: October 19 to December 15, 2018, New York
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