Nate Lowman was one of the post-9/11 “Three Amigos” who set Manhattan’s downtown scene a fire, along with fellow provocateurs Dan Colen (on view at James Cope’s gallery during Fair Week) and late Menil progeny/prodigy Dash Snow. This internationally exhibited, Guggenheim-collected, Whitney Biennial painter/sculptor/maker with his preternaturally gray hair was also famously stalked by paparazzi when he dated an Olsen twin. Fresh from last spring’s eagerly watched show at New York City’s Maccarone — the gallery will feature his art in its booth, come Dallas Art Fair time — Lowman is an agile and adept conjurer of objects that seem to embody the American dream gone terribly awry. The artist’s raison d’être was most epically realized in 2012 at the Brant Foundation, where he transformed the cavernous Greenwich, Connecticut, art space into a kunsthalle filled with fronts from rusting gas pumps, cruciform-shaped structures salvaged from tow trucks, bullet-hole paintings and gargantuan air-freshener forms plastered across a wall, while setting the Bronco previously owned by O. J. Simpson upon the lawn. What does this creative have up his sleeve for Dallas? Catherine D. Anspon chats with Lowman via email about his love for car culture, being pals with Richard Prince and lighting out for the West.
What can you divulge about your Dallas Contemporary solo? I’m planning a pool party with barbecue. Do they make vegetarian barbecue?
Will you reprise the intriguing library installation, based upon your personal collection, which you created at the Brant Foundation? I will not be exhibiting any artworks from my personal collection in Dallas, but I will show a series of objects that come from my domestic life. I have begun making a few pieces of furniture, mostly lamps, which live in my apartment with my art collection, and I plan to show a group of these at the Dallas Contemporary.