While Nate Lowman is known mostly for snatching up sleepy cultural iconographics and galvanizing them with tragic and comic tropes—the (sinister) smiley face, the (ecstatic) bullet hole—the 32-year-old artist has also been accused of borrowing too often from the same well of references. Now Lowman’s expansive show of work taking over New York’s Maccarone gallery and its West Village neighbor Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (April 30 to June 18, at both) features, among other targets, a new obsession with the Apple logo—the spiritual heir to his smiley faces—and a series of paintings based on Willem de Kooning’s canvases of Marilyn Monroe. Lowman, who set out to make just three, ended up creating 20 (prudently, not all of them are on view here). “I like the psychosis of it,” he says about the intensive, repetitive process of taking something and turning it into his thing. “I imagine it’s why serial killers get a weird joy out of killing the same way every time. I just do it until I’m done with it.”
-
W
- Art & Design
