A hallmark of pop art is taking a ubiquitous but overlooked totem of capitalist enterprise and reinventing it. Andy Warhol had the Campbell’s soup can. Claes Oldenburg had the lipstick tube. Nate Lowman, 33, has his: the smiley face.
The icon appears on shopping bags and bumper stickers, and has gotten a second wind as an emoticon that smartphone users plop at the end of text messages. And Mr. Lowman is somewhat obsessed with it, seeing in it a kind of collective mask — what he calls an “anxious hysteria to appear happy.”
“It’s like a casual formality,” he said, walking around his TriBeCa studio on a recent day in a tie-dyed, hooded sweatshirt, a pair of white jeans that were beat up to the point of no longer really being white, and a pair of old black boots. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just like ‘Happy! Happy!’ ”
He stopped in front of a canvas on which the icon was painted or drawn hundreds of times, and gave it a look that was somewhere between quizzical and perturbed. There were smiley faces connected to arms and legs that were contorted like swastikas. There were pizzas on which pepperoni appeared where the eyes and the nose would be; on yet others, there were smiley faces connected to a certain part of the male anatomy.
Of course, any artist drawn to a symbol so benign probably isn’t the most happy-go-lucky guy on the planet. Rather, Mr. Lowman comes off as pensive, slightly skeptical, a little removed. “I’m not a pessimist at all, but I’m not an optimist either,” he said. But that doesn’t seem to be hurting his stature of late.
Mr. Lowman is a star of a young downtown art scene that moves freely among the worlds of fashion, art and society. He is a widely photographed man-about-town, D.J.’ing at the Whitney Gala, sitting with Daphne Guinness at a dinner hosted by Interview magazine, and hobnobbing with fashionistas at a handbag party for Balmain.