Nate Lowman: hurricanes of color
Nate Lowman - Irene - 2021
From 10 March to 16 April 2022, the David Zwirner Gallery in New York presents "Nate Lowman: Let's Go", an exhibition of works by the American artist Nate Lowman.
Image: Nate Lowman, Irene, 2021. © Nate Lowman. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner
Considered one of the most important figures in the movement of blurred boundaries known as "Neo-pop", Nate Lowman (born 1979 in Las Vegas Valley) draws on images from a variety of sources (news, mass media, or art history itself) to create paintings and sculptures that develop a narrative with critical and ironic undertones. For this exhibition, Lowman has taken satellite images of hurricanes that have affected the coasts of the United States, retouching and manipulating these images that carry an implicit message of violence and destruction, in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of Andy Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series. David Zwirner Gallery explains in a press release:
The exhibition features a series of new large-scale, vibrantly saturated paintings that depicts “false color” satellite renderings of hurricanes which have struck the United States in recent decades with increasing frequency and devastation, continuing the artist’s ongoing interest in this imagery. Lowman examines the painterly possibilities afforded by their rendered, non-referential colors, devised to highlight variations in cloud temperature. Overlaid with black dotted and gestural markings akin to those from a blurred Xerox, the resultant canvases play on the tensions between the technological and the painted image, and representational imagery and pure color. 
These works engage in a dialogue with art-historical precedents and influences that range from American pop art and appropriation, and the unconstrained abstraction of color field painting, while remaining inextricably linked to a contemporary sociopolitical context. While scientific and technological, these images ultimately function in the public media as abstract, iconographic stand-ins for the violence and devastation they represent; they are universally recognized and understood, despite their formless inaccuracy, as representations of real events. 

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