FYWH03

Fill You With Holes - EXTRA CONTENT Lygia Clark

Nate Lowman

Dates
24.03.2010 | 15.05.2010
Gallery
London
New exhibition by cult American artist Nate Lowman dealing with the dark side of the American dream, showing alongside Lowman are works from late sixties by Lygia Clark. Carlson gallery is delighted to present Fill you with Holes, a new exhibition by the American artist Nate Lowman. The show investigates Lowman’s unique critique of culture and the irony of the subjective images we surround ourselves with. For his first show at the gallery, Nate Lowman engages with the issues of the circle – from the iconography of smiley faces that the artist recently rendered in an in depth exploration, to the subversion of the circle: the shrapnel from the Una-Bomber explosion as shaped canvases. The circle is at the center of a game featured in the exhibition - a horseshoe toss set up in the center of the gallery inspiring the viewer to enter and immediately engage with it (don’t throw one, it might hit a Lygia Clark). The other gaming tropes are 4 gaudy bean bag throw planks (once again a circle) that intercept the more stylized works. And lastly, the circle, as Lowman points out, has a right wing political agenda exemplified by smiling girls wearing Adolf Hitler tee shirts or the painting of a Supreme Court judge scrutinizing the infamous ballots of the 1999 election. The centerpiece of the exhibition is ‘Fucking Posers’, a large scale multi panel painting depicting images of people in shackles with a funny ‘aside’ represented by a Policeman with a pile of doughnuts. The ‘schacklers’ are all posed with smiles on their faces, and the policeman is absolutely jolly. Acting as a sharp contrast to their smiley faces, the gas pump side panels remind us of the gas crisis that gripped the USA as well as of the global collapse of the economy. Acting as extra content for this exhibition, are four canvases by Lygia Clark from the 50’s. Throughout the exhibition, Clark’s canvases punctuate Lowman’s work formally. The show opens with the dialogue between Lowman’s signature, ‘bullet hole’ (Escalade, 2010) and the 1958 Lygia Clark painting, ‘Planos em Superficie Modulada n°2’. Whilst Clarke’s painting uses form and shape to explore a possible reality of space, the bullet hole canvas attempts to open up the central hole

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Nate Lowman
Ritratto Nate Lowman