Curator: Antoine Marchand

The FRAC will be closed from August 1st to August 23rd 2016

Nate Lowman has created both pictorial and sculptural pieces which are a testimony to the American society. His work involves mingling current events with cultural references to pop culture detritus, through collages, installations and painting. His creations are the result of a very particular technique which is actually similar to xerography printing. In the last few years, he has exploited images as well as everyday objects from disparate universes and eras in order to mingle cultural references without following any hierarchical logic. However, Nate Lowman’s work goes beyond copying and recycling styles used by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol in their time, or more recently, Richard Prince. Nate Lowman’s main focus is storytelling. Among his heterogeneous compositions, no image takes priority over another; the relations between images create a potential storyboard. The artist is not trying to create a unique narrative structure as much as intertwining iconographic references that echo as a whole in this day and age. Neither innocent, or particularly ambiguous, Nate Lowman’s works are sometimes of a violent tone as well as being melancholic and pessimistic, while also reflecting irony and dark humor.

For his exhibition World of Interiors at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, which will be the first in a French public institution, Nate Lowman will present a selection of artworks which have never been seen before and were created for this occasion. These art pieces will also reveal the new direction he has taken in his work. As a matter of fact, the paintings on view here were created in response to the architecture of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne’s renovated building, all the while reflecting the place they were produced, in Nate Lowman’s art studio in Tribeca. Irony is a defining feature of Nate Lowman’s who had also considered balancing his exhibition between indoors and outdoors, creativity and recycling, as well as nature and culture.

Since his first monographic exhibition in 2005 at the Maccarone gallery in New York City (THE END. And Other American Pastimes), Nate Lowman’s (born in 1979 in Las Vegas; lives and works in New York) work was featured at the Museum of Modern Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenhheim Museum and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which are all located in New York, as well as in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo and in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi. He had solo shows at Midway Contempary Art in Minneapolis (Axis of Praxis, 2006), at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo (The Natriot Act, 2009), at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich (I Wanted to Be an Artist but all I got was this Lousy Career, 2012) and at Dallas Contemporary (America Sneezes, 2015). His art work was also featured in the 12^th Biennale de Lyon (Entretemps... Brusquement, et ensuite, 2013) as well as in the Empire State Exhibition (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 2013). Nate Lowman is represented by the Massimo De Carlo galleries in London, Milan and Hong-Kong as well as the Maccarone gallery in New York.

The Nate Lowman exhibition has received support from the gallery Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong.

With support from Champagne Taittinger