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Mother’s Indigestion

Nate Lowman

日期
01.09.2021 | 19.09.2021
画廊
Pièce Unique
文件
PRESS RELEASE

2021 has seemed to burst with a chorus of volcanic eruptions. Even (or maybe especially) from afar, these eruptions make you feel connected to history.

Whatever happens just above the tectonic plates leading to a rupture that sends lava out of the top of the cone is strangely grounding. But then the ground itself is on fire and you also have to deal with the extreme poetics of fire raining from the sky. So it’s devastatingly creative.

I first encountered the paintings of Ippolito Caffi in an exhibition called “Romanticismo” in Milano in 2019. I saw one painting of a solar eclipse in Venezia and another of Vesuvio. Before returning home to New York, I visited two other countries, so it wasn’t until many months later, when I was looking through my pictures and reading my notebooks that I remembered seeing these paintings.

I was working on a painting of a Volcanic eruption in Indonesia when I rediscovered the Caffi pictures. I have some close Italian friends spending the pandemic in Venice and I asked them to look around for some Caffi books with good reproductions of his paintings. They sent me a few and within a day of receiving them I realized I wanted to make a painting out of a composite of two of his studies of Vesuvio.

I spent months figuring out how to repaint two sections of two of his tiny studies (both of which he probably painted in minutes). His paintings were a few inches wide, and my paintings of his paintings would be 9 feet wide. I made two composite “Frankenstein” paintings of Caffi’s Vesuvio studies so that I could show one in Paris and one in New York at the same time.

At a time in which it is very difficult to travel, it appeals to me to have two versions of the same painting being exhibited simultaneously in two cities.

My paintings of Caffi’s paintings are also painted and exhibited in homage to Andy Warhol, who’s 1985 painting, “Vesuvius” was exhibited at the original Pièce Unique gallery in 1994. Warhol has a special relationship with the iconic image. While people today seem obsessed with “de-mystifying” ideas and ways of life, Warhol’s artworks are able to lay bare the way that terribly real things can remain mundane and reach mythical proportions simultaneously.

There is a non-scientific equation that renders the patriarchal world as a nuclear family. Father God, whether dead or in jail, is irrelevant. Humanity, the perpetual child, has actualized its Oedipal conquest and moved in permanently with Mother Earth. Mother’s Indigestion—swirling from the skies above or pressure-cooking and exploding from Earth’s core—reminds the children momentarily that the rocking cradle is also the grave.

—Nate Lowman

Nate Lowman

内特·洛曼1979年生于美国内华达州拉斯维加斯,目前工作居住在美国纽约。


纽约艺术家内特·洛曼的作品关注艺术和社会中权力、美与暴力的结合。不同主题总是嵌入到与媒介紧密联系的关系中,包括精妙的技术,例如模仿丝网的点画,以及形状复杂的手工拉伸画布。他的创作跨越绘画、印刷,和雕塑,通过挪用并重置预先存在的图像,创造出具有象征意义的作品,反映了许多当代问题,例如大众消费主义、名人流行文化与暴力。


内特·洛曼的作品被众多机构收藏,包括:奥尔布赖特·诺克斯艺术馆,纽约;阿斯楚普费恩利现代艺术博物馆,奥斯陆;蓬皮杜艺术中心,巴黎;马西亚诺艺术基金会,洛杉矶;大都会艺术博物馆,纽约;斯德哥尔摩当代美术馆,斯德哥尔摩;纽约现代艺术博物馆,纽约;古根海姆博物馆,纽约;惠特尼美国艺术博物馆,纽约。

Ritratto Nate Lowman