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Elliptical Machine Gun

Nate Lowman

Dates
05.04.2018 | 12.05.2018
Gallery
File

Massimo De Carlo is pleased to present Elliptical Machine Gun, American artist Nate Lowman’s first exhibition at Palazzo Belgioioso in Milan.

Nate Lowman’s new solo show Elliptical Machine Gun reflects on the machine gun, a military weapon devised to fire indefinitely as long as the trigger is held down. In recent years, a semi- automatic version of this gun has increasingly been used in American mass shootings. This phenomenon, wherein an (often legally) armed civilian opens fire on a group of other civilians, killing or injuring dozens within minutes, is a uniquely American horror in its widespread, recurring form. In spite of repeated tragedies, no mass shooting crime seems terrible enough to create meaningful changes in American gun law. The right to bear arms, a founding tenet of the United States Constitution, is touted as justification for loose regulations in the thriving domestic firearms market.

Nate Lowman’s work concerns itself with the intersections of power, beauty, and violence in art and society, but these themes always come embedded within a highly specific and intimate relationship to materials, including laborious studio techniques such as a pointillist dot painting meant to resemble silkscreens, and intricately shaped hand-stretched canvases.

In Elliptical Machine Gun, Lowman fuses imagery of machine guns with elliptical trainer machines, linked by their suggestion of limitlessness in the expenditure of deadly force or muscular endurance. Flowers and bullet holes, a recurring iconographic theme in Lowman’s work, appear as bursts that signal gunfire or simply as existential abstractions, depicting expansion and fragmentation moving outward from a fixed point in time and space. In this exhibition, Lowman further refines his image-making approach in the service of a layered, open-ended portrayal of the textures of life and death under the American dream.

Nate Lowman

Nate Lowman was born in 1979 in Las Vegas, he currently lives and works in New York.


Lowman’s work delves into the intersections of power, beauty, and violence within art and society. These themes are intricately woven into a highly specific and intimate relationship with materials, often employing labour-intensive studio techniques like pointillist dot painting, intended to mimic silkscreens and intricately shaped hand-stretched canvases. Reflecting on contemporary issues such as mass consumerism, celebrity pop culture, and violence, Lowman appropriates and manipulates pre-existing imagery to generate symbolic references.


Lowman’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ritratto Nate Lowman