Βlake, Fallon, Steven, Alexis, Krystle, 2005
Digital c-prints
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift
Nate Lowman’s work incorporates various cultural references, focusing on the contradictions of contemporary American identity. Drawing on imagery from art history, current events, and pop culture, he transforms it into a complex body, reimagining familiar visual motifs. A prime example is the series Oil Rigs, which began in 2004, when the artist came across a collection of discarded images at the Brooklyn Public Library. These newspaper clippings depicting offshore oil rigs fascinated him because of their contradictory nature: they combine an otherworldly beauty with a sense of threat and environmental peril. To create the works, Lowman rephotographed the clippings on 35mm film, using intense lighting and enlarging their details to monumental scale. As the artist notes, these images, despite their paradoxical nature, “are more beautiful than anything science fiction ever invented, yet they have completely real and often terrible consequences for the world”. The titles of the works, inspired by the main characters of the 1980s American soap opera Dynasty, about an iconic family of Texan oil tycoons, further reinforce the connection to the themes of wealth and excess.
Through sardonic humour and a subtly melancholic tone, Lowman reinterprets familiar images, imbuing them with new meaning. In this context, the oil rigs emerge as potent symbols of expansionism and economic dominance, linked to the geopolitical operations of the United States. At the same time, they allude to the exploitation of natural resources and the environmental and social consequences this entails, shedding light on the tensions between power, development, and ecological consciousness.
Nate Lowman was born in 1979 in Las Vegas. He lives and works in New York.
