I was standing with Nate Lowman in his Tribeca studio in front of a canvas shaped like the United States, each state represented by a piece of fabric, or by a fragment of another, abandoned painting. Lowman pointed to where his great-grandmother lived in Colorado, west of a spackled Four Corners. “[She] was a crazy quilter, and I have most of the quilts that got left behind,” he confided. “I’m sure that’s where I got the idea to use all these errant scraps.”
Some background on Nate Lowman: He’s from California, but not LA; rather, a mountainous town called Idyllwild not dissimilar from Aspen. (He’ll be exhibiting, at the Aspen Art Museum, from December 15.) Along with his contemporaries Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley, Lowman once had the good (or bad) fortune to be assigned one of those oversized zeitgeist-y labels that the art world loves: “Warhol’s Children.” Lowman just had his first child, a son. In 2013, a particularly nasty review referenced Lowman’s “bad-boy career.” But as he stood in his Tribeca studio, the only subversive thing about the artist appeared to be his decision to wear one red Converse and one black.
Before and After, Lowman’s Aspen show, draws heavily on a personal archive that reaches back over a decade. Its curator, Heidi Zuckerman, organized it around the theme of desire, and the result takes in everything from smiley faces to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano (which Lowman calls an “insanely beautiful inconvenience”). And while the artist has made reference to such events as the OJ Simpson trial and the Lockerbie bombing, he doesn’t concern himself with their timeliness. “You process what happens in your lifetime all the time and you find a way to make art about it and communicate the thoughts that are crystallized from your experience,” he explained. “The image of Nicole Brown Simpson from the early nineties, I’m painting that in 2011. Because that’s when I want to talk about it.”