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David Zwirner is pleased to present new paintings by Nate Lowman at its London location, marking the gallery’s first exhibition of the American artist’s work since announcing representation this spring. 

Lowman has become known for deftly mining images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, and installations. Since the early 2000s, the artist has continually pushed the boundaries of his multimedia approach with works that are at turns political, humorous, and poetic. Through his art—which dynamically explores themes of representation, celebrity, obsession, and violence—Lowman stages an encounter with commonplace, universally recognisable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process. Having amassed a visual archive of source material, Lowman often processes the significance of images over time, typically returning to a picture on several occasions before making it the subject of one of his multivalent works. ‘The artist’s sociological impulse’, as art critic David Rimanelli notes, ‘[is] to research and catalogue a world that is, for all its immediacy, more customarily, and more comfortably, seen at a distance.’

This exhibition features a new series of paintings, begun in 2018, based on crime scene photos of the mass shooting that took place on October 1, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada, where a gunman attacked civilians attending the Route 91 Harvest country music festival, resulting in fifty-nine deaths. Following an investigation, which yielded no identifiable motive, the police released photos of the Mandalay Bay hotel room and surrounding area where the gunman carried out his attack. Drawn to the perfunctory quality of the photographs, as much as to their uneasy sense of timelessness and placelessness, Lowman, who was born in Las Vegas, began translating the images, one by one, into paintings, in part as an attempt to grapple with the unanswerable questions posed by the shooting. The resultant works probe the tensions between the everyday and the extreme, presence and absence, and, more broadly, violence and representation.