Nate Lowman

2000s New York and an Already-Photographed Reality

Born in Las Vegas in 1979 and based in New York, Nate Lowman has long begun with images already reproduced in public life: newspapers, tabloids, advertisements, the internet, crime reporting, and road signs. An Aspen Art Museum exhibition situated his paintings and installations within an American visual culture structured by mass-reproduced images^*1.

MoMA’s artist record notes Lowman’s participation in Greater New York in 2005 and Defamation of Character in 2006–07, showing that his work had entered institutional discussions in New York by the middle of the decade^*21.

MASSIMODECARLO likewise describes Lowman as working across painting, sculpture, and installation while repeatedly incorporating circulated images and tracking how their meanings change when they enter new settings^*2.

For Lowman in the early 2000s, photography was less a privileged medium for capturing new reality than a substrate of visual information worn down by newsprint, photocopying, web circulation, and commercial reproduction. In Stay in School at NYU’s 80WSE, he transferred images of youth, pop stars, and violence from magazines and newspapers onto the walls, making the construction and destruction of the installation part of the work itself^*3.

What Remained After Appropriation

Lowman inherits the appropriation strategies of the 1980s, when artists quoted and reused preexisting images to question authorship and the value of the original. His work, however, cannot be reduced to a rejection of artistic originality. The Met describes Autocide as incorporating an online image of a snowman and reproducing in paint the degradation caused by repeated copying, linking post-Warhol Pop with conceptual forms of quotation^*4.

MoMA PS1’s Defamation of Character took détournement—the redirection of existing media toward different meanings—as one of its organizing ideas and presented Lowman’s “hijacked landscape” in relation to a culture in which pollution, racist language, and damaged reputations circulate^*22.

Astrup Fearnley Museet identifies news, popular media, and art-historical images as Lowman’s raw material, while emphasizing his interest in making new narratives from them. Installations that gather multiple images on a wall without a fixed hierarchy generate meaning through proximity. They function less as attempts to expose an image’s source than as ways to test how public memory changes when one image is joined to another^*5.

To place Lowman within photographic history, it is useful to consider his distance from the Pictures Generation, whose artists in late-1970s and 1980s New York rephotographed and reedited mass-media imagery. The Met notes that Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth, and others cropped, rephotographed, and decontextualized magazine photographs, advertisements, and logos in order to question authorship and originality^*25 Lowman belongs to a later generation. His starting point is less the act of quotation itself than the fact that the quoted material has already been copied repeatedly and has moved across news media, commodities, and the web.

The distinction becomes especially clear in the New Museum’s 2010 exhibition The Last Newspaper. During the run of the show, Lowman added paintings responding to weekly news stories, folding the speed at which newspapers update into the time of production itself^*26 The question here is not simply who owns the source image, but how events become news, are displaced by newer images, and are filtered so that only certain images persist.

An early 2003 text already described Lowman as a “second-, third-, or perhaps fourth-generation” appropriation artist after Warhol and Prince, documenting his collection of media images of madness, rebellion, politics, and violence and their incorporation into collage, painting, photography, and wall arrangements^*27 For that reason, there was little need for him to photograph an event anew. The object of critique already appeared as an existing image circulating through society before he approached it.

Turning Copy Degradation into Painterly Surface

Lowman translates low-resolution photographs, newspaper halftones, and the fading of photocopies into screenprinting, resin-based alkyd paint, and stippled brushwork. Gagosian’s text for Never Remember emphasizes how printing technologies and mass-media images acquire on the painted surface an immediacy akin to skin or a wound^*6.

Recurring motifs from early in his career—bullet holes, smiley faces, air fresheners, hand-drawn hearts—also become shaped canvases whose supports follow the contours of the images themselves. According to Gagosian, the bullet holes are treated as trompe-l’oeil decals, placing photography’s appearance of being a trace on the same plane as the sign-value of a commodity^*7.

The Whitney’s Reverse Escalade uses screenprinting and acrylic on an irregularly shaped canvas, allowing a fragment from printed media to determine the very shape of the painting^*8 The photograph is not concealed as a preparatory image beneath the painting. Halftone dots, cropped contours, and losses produced through reproduction remain part of the finished work’s form.

What Do We See When We Look at Images of Events?

Lowman’s use of crime and accident photographs is not simply a way to introduce shocking subject matter. In a work such as the Whitney’s The Last Marilyn, familiar figures and press images are joined to painted and sprayed marks, so viewers encounter the event together with the imagery through which they already know it^*9.

MoMA’s Untitled (History of the SUV—No Blond Jokes) (2003) layers an image of a famous woman repeatedly circulated in tabloids through copying and distorted silkscreen transfer, turning the media’s reshaping of the event’s memory into the structure of the work^*23 What matters here is circulation after the photograph has been made. As an image moves through newspapers, photocopies, television and the internet, and commercial printing, each repetition gives it a new level of resolution, a new explanation, and a new set of value judgments.

At the Whitney in 2013, Lowman performed a public copy of a work by Jay DeFeo. By deliberately reenacting the longstanding museum practice of copying, he shifted appropriation away from anonymous data extraction and back toward the acts of looking, copying, and repeating as forms of making^*10.

Autocide and the Materialization of an Internet Image

Autocide (2012) enlarges an online image of a snowman onto a monumental canvas in oil and alkyd. As Lowman’s official biography makes clear, his work extends beyond painting into publishing, exhibition making, and collaborative projects, but these activities share an editorial approach to selecting existing images anew^*11.

That editorial impulse also appears in his curatorial projects. The projects gathered on his official site show that creating situations in which images and works are read through juxtaposition, rather than in isolation, extends across both his making and exhibition activity^*12.

David Zwirner similarly describes Lowman’s recent work as bringing signs and reproduced images from everyday American life into painting, moving between visual familiarity and the material presence of paint^*13.

From Maps to Parking: National Territory and Everyday Signs

In the Maps series from Never Remember, Lowman cut the outlines of U.S. states from studio drop cloths, layering stains, splashes, and associations of stitching onto the shapes of political maps. Gagosian describes the series as unsettling the sense of the nation as a single fixed diagram and treating borders as accumulations of history and contingency^*6.

In Parking (2024), parking lots, road surfaces, signs, and peripheral urban forms observed in Los Angeles became a new painterly vocabulary. David Zwirner presented the exhibition as part of Lowman’s ongoing attention to the density of forms and signs in everyday surroundings, rather than as a detached sociological survey^*14.

The exhibition checklist includes works such as Tunnel Kiss, Howl, and Shade in the Made in media ranging from oil, enamel, and latex to monotype and bronze. Keeping photographic source imagery from being tied to a single technique is part of what allows Lowman to treat the image itself as material^*15.

Working Without Taking the Photograph: Making Image Circulation into Art

A 2025 exhibition at Gallery COMMON in Tokyo presented Lowman’s method as a continuum of appropriation, repetition, and reframing. When an image moves into another cultural setting, its prior meaning is not preserved intact; that instability is one of the conditions under which his work operates^*16.

In an Interview Magazine conversation, Lowman describes how images in progress become connected to news, personal memory, and accidents in the studio, indicating that the finished work is not intended as an illustration of a single source of information^*17.

An earlier Interview Magazine feature likewise describes his habit of picking up existing visual material encountered in the city and in the media and moving it into painting^*18 This shifts the historical question from who pressed the shutter to what an image accumulates as it circulates through society after it has been made.

The Limits and Force of Media Critique

The New Museum archive places Lowman in the context of “neo-appropriation,” in which earlier appropriation strategies were reactivated within a 2000s image environment of news media, graffiti, bumper stickers, and related forms^*19 Its force lies in leaving intact the contradiction that Lowman does not claim a position outside the media from which to expose the truth; he selects, reproduces, and commodifies images from within the same circuits he examines.

The e-flux announcement for The Natriot Act situates Lowman’s use of quotation in relation to Duchamp, Warhol, Richard Prince, and Kenneth Noland, while emphasizing his selection, editing, and manipulation of existing images into nonlinear narratives^*24.

The Brant Foundation describes tabloid clippings, bumper stickers, bullet-hole decals, and other found images as materials through which Lowman reconnects public history and personal memory^*20 In Lowman’s work, painting and exhibition making center on how press photographs, online images, and printed matter continue to persist after they have separated from the events they once described.