David Zwirner is pleased to present new work by Nate Lowman (b. 1979), opening at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street location in New York. The exhibition debuts a body of shaped canvases that take the form of keys–objects freighted with associations of access, security, and exclusion–a new motif for the artist.
Lowman has frequently employed universally recognizable shaped canvases including hearts, tree-shaped air fresheners, poppies, and maps, among others, each produced in iterations with distinct painted surfaces. His key paintings extend this vocabulary, ranging from tightly rendered replicas to more schematic, nearly abstract forms. Some reproduce dissonant photographic imagery taken by the artist; others appropriate the bright, patterned novelty finishes available at hardware stores to distinguish one key from another; whereas another work, a silkscreen diptych, represents two keys yet to be cut into their final shape. The paintings recall distinct art-historical registers—from hard-edged geometric abstraction to loose, gestural markmaking, to the flattened logic of the readymade—each employing a different painterly language on the same recurring form.
