Nate Lowman

Nate Lowman was born in 1979 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He grew up in Idyllwild, California, where he graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy, a boarding high school focused on the arts, before moving to New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from New York University in 2001.

Lowman's practice combines painting, silkscreen, and mixed-media appropriation. Recurring motifs, cartoon bullet holes, smiley faces, air fresheners, tombstones, and ironic bumper stickers, run through works that draw on tabloid and news imagery to probe how mass media packages violence, celebrity, and beauty. He has also worked in a labor-intensive, pointillist dot-painting technique and with hand-stretched canvases.

His exhibition history includes early solo shows at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis (2006) and the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo (2009), a survey at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut (2012), and further solo presentations at Dallas Contemporary (2015), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (2016), the Aspen Art Museum (2017), and a return to the Astrup Fearnley Museet (2018). Gagosian exhibited his work in earlier years and continues to list him among its artists. He joined David Zwirner in 2019, with a first solo presentation at the gallery's London space, followed by shows in New York (2022) and Los Angeles ("Parking," 2024), a Paris project tied to the Musee Delacroix ("After Delacroix," 2025), and a solo exhibition scheduled to open at the gallery's 19th Street location in New York in fall 2026. He is also represented by Massimo De Carlo. He lives and works in New York City.

Institutional and gallery writing on Lowman consistently frames him as an artist who mines the visual language of American mass media, tabloids, news photography, road signage, and consumer packaging, to comment on violence, celebrity, and beauty standards without editorializing directly. Museums including MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and Centre Pompidou have collected his work, and institutions such as the Aspen Art Museum and the Astrup Fearnley Museet have given him dedicated surveys, indicating strong curatorial confidence in the work's staying power. No verifiable, exact critic quotation from a named writer at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Market trackers report a highest realized price for a Lowman painting near USD 871,000, per MutualArt, though the exact work, auction house, and sale date have not been independently confirmed. Public results for his work otherwise sit mostly in the low to mid five figures, and the number of auction appearances remains modest relative to artists with a comparable museum profile. His continued gallery exhibition schedule through 2026, including a new solo show planned at David Zwirner in New York, points to sustained primary-market activity even where secondary-market data points are sparse.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Lowman, so provenance and verification through his current galleries, David Zwirner and Massimo De Carlo, matter more than usual. His auction record is thin relative to his museum footprint, which means a single strong or weak sale can move headline statistics more than it would for an artist with deeper trading history. Collectors should also note that his gallery representation includes David Zwirner (since 2019) and Massimo De Carlo, while Gagosian, which represented him earlier, still lists him as an artist; collectors should confirm current representation before any transaction.