Exceptional Works: Nate Lowman

Grass Sham Glass, 2024

Oil and alkyd on linen  72 x 84 inches  182.9 x 213.4 cm

In advance of Nate Lowman’s highly anticipated solo exhibition in Los Angeles, we are pleased to present Grass Sham Glass (2024) from the artist’s new series of paintings.

Nate Lowman

Grass Sham Glass, 2024

Oil and alkyd on linen

72 x 84 inches (182.9 x 213.4 cm)

Lowman’s new paintings combine a range of opposing registers of art history, culture, and meaning. Views of distinct golf courses, found by the artist in various photographic sources that include both recent imagery and 1970s and ’80s golfing monographs, are merged into composites that confound any fixed point of view and create impossible perspectives on the plane of the canvas. Lowman heightens the highly designed, rendered artificiality of the golf courses by translating this placeless imagery into paint with striking color.

Nate Lowman, 2019

“A lot of the images I use are already out there in the public or in the news … so they’ve already been talked about, already been consumed. I’m reopening them to get at their second, third, or fourth meanings.”

—Nate Lowman

Nate Lowman, Grass Sham Glass, 2024 (detail)

Claude Monet, La Grenouillère, 1868. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Grass Sham Glass depicts a scene of disorientation. The lush forest of pine trees seen on the lower half of the composition is the natural inverse of the manicured golf-course green above. The trees almost appear to be a reflection in a body of water as they grow downward, disappearing off the bottom edge of the picture plane.

The composition calls to mind Claude Monet’s 1868 painting La Grenouillère, which Monet described as coming from a dream: "I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillère.” Both paintings are dreamlike, with the viewer suspended between a right-side-up reality and an upside-down vision.

Nate Lowman, Grass Sham Glass, 2024 (detail)

“Lowman’s greatest painterly strength: his visual ability to zero in on one solid thing or shape, isolate it from the world, and present it as an autonomous object.”

—Jerry Saltz, art critic

Nate Lowman, Grass Sham Glass, 2024 (detail)

The work’s shape-shifting sand traps recall a surrealist landscape such as Salvador Dalí's 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, which curator Anne Umland described as having a hallucinatory, hyperrealistic atmosphere.

The amorphous, rounded shapes of the sand traps contrast with the severely cut turf and grass. David Hockney explored the manicured lawn as a tranquil dream, exerting control over the landscape by depicting sprinklers; he was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of water.

Lowman’s Grass Sham Glass enhances the otherworldliness of manmade landscapes.

“Nate Lowman’s sociological impulse [is] to research and catalog a world that is, for all its immediacy, more customarily, and more comfortably, seen at a distance.”

—David Rimanelli, art critic and curator

Nate Lowman: Parking