MY FAVORITE PART OF MY FAVORITE PAINTING, 2011

Ready to hang

Nate Lowman is a leading figure in the generation of young contemporary artists who follow closely in the footsteps of Pop master Andy Warhol. Recycling material from mass media and art history, Lowman’s oeuvre is an exploration and commentary of pop culture detritus in America. Working alongside contemporaries including Dan Colen, Ryan McGinley and the late Dash Snow, Lowman is known for his downtown, non-conformist approach to art making, and the importance of his paintings have proven themselves via their popularity in the international art scene.

The present work, shows part of his seminal Marilyn painting. His Marilyn painting is part of a series of remarkable paintings inspired by Willem de Kooning’s Marilyn Monroe canvases from 1954 which artist Nate Lowman created in 2011 for an exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise and Maccarone in New York. The exhibition, titled “Trash Landing,” opened to much acclaim, and the appeal of these Marilyn paintings is readily evident in the present canvas. In the composition, Lowman combines America’s fixation with the image of the female blonde, epitomized by Marilyn Monroe, with his personal reinterpretation of de Kooning’s flair. The result is a fascinating marriage of Warholian Popism and de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionism, where a beautiful celebrity icon is laced with violence through layers of macho and aggressive brushstrokes.

Lowman’s appropriation of Marilyn’s image may also have been an expression of his lamentation at the death of his friend Dash Snow who passed away from a drug overdose at the age of 27. “I think about Dash everyday. I go through periods of anger and periods of confusion. But dead people don’t really die. They live on within you.” (the artist quoted in J. Bernstein, “Why Isn’t This Man Smiling”, The New York Times, 26 December, 2012, online) Notably utilized by Warhol, the icon of Marilyn has often been used as a tragic theme and leading subject in exploring the theme of the transience of life, and the correlation between Lowman’s works to those of Warhol unquestionably shows the profound influence that Warhol’s art has had on Nate Lowman.