by Anne Gabriel
Nate. A name, that when I hear it is synonymous with the words: white male. Not Nathan or Nathaniel—but a short and sweet Nate. The kind of moniker that is readily given during frat boy hazing rituals. There’s something adorably off about every Nate’s hair. Frankly, I hadn’t heard of Nate prior to entering Zwirner gallery in Los Angeles on a balmy October day, yes, balmy because it was fall in Los Angeles after all.
Oh dearest Nate.
I could have guessed the paintings that you would paint—large oils depicting old money golf courses but presented as a birds-eye view (or perhaps more jetsetter-eye view) of fetishized landscapes. What made you obsesses over manicured grass and sandpits, I cannot say other than to guess that the obsession was over what this province represented—money, and lots of it. As the landscape is abstracted into green, the green of massive investments and trustfunds has been alchemized into these landscapes—bringing attention to the act of the landscape being made duller by the presence of mankind. And in this case I mean mankind in the most masculine sense.
Given that 2024 saw the gallery world sales of contemporary art come to a stand still—the most quintessential show to stage to help pull one out of the slump— you guessed it paintings of gold, I mean golf courses, because we all know that most collectors of contemporary fine art either feign or faint at the sight of expansive manicured lawns and sticks hurled at balls to the tune of a caddy. What to do with one’s life when it has been all abstracted into green? Go out on the green, see the green, paint the green for the art-collecting clubmen to hang in their clubs. Capitulate completely to out old and new overlords. Pretend there is some act of creation in their steamrolling of providence and in your gormless reproduction of it.
I could write more, but the amount of space the show has already been given—is more than adequate.
Photo: Nate Lowman, Advantage Perfection (Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness), 2024 (detail)