NATE LOWMAN : THIS NEIGHBORHOOD'S CHANGED
For over two decades, New York based artist Nate Lowman has created work that interrogates American pop culture as its central treatise. Themes of commercialism, violence, and mass media are imbued in his recurring visual motifs. Given the way the artist experiments with and returns to these motifs over the years, their symbolism also evolves with the times; a painted aerial view of a golf course in 2012 presents a somewhat different political suggestion than one in the Trumpian context we find exhibited in 2025.
Lowman is brilliant at creating connections between disparate topics — works that at first seem unconnected are somehow brought together thematically by nature of being displayed in the same space, or as revisited concepts from earlier in his career. This is the thought behind This Neighborhood’s Changed, Lowman’s current exhibition — his first in Tokyo — curated by Matt Black at Gallery Commune. Here, Lowman and Black ‘remix’ the artist’s prior works by placing them in an updated setting next to new works. There is a sense of the familiar and unfamiliar; a reframing and restructuring of meaning. As always with Lowman’s work, This Neighborhood’s Changed is laden with commentary — even the show’s title seems to nod to the way American society is contorting.
With Lowman in Tokyo for the show, we caught up with him to chat about the processes behind the exhibition, get his thoughts on the work and the way it has developed over time, and the current state of the art world.
Nate, how did This Neighborhood’s Changed come about?
It was Matt's idea. He just started coming by my studio, like once a week or something, since the fall. I've never done a show in Japan before so I knew it was a great opportunity for me, but it was a case of, ‘what do we do’? And it's different here, so Matt helped me guide my thinking as well as making some choices — he was communicating with the gallery about what kind of things they wanted to show. It's a little bit of that and a little bit of me going ‘what the hell do I want to make?’.
I was going to ask you about the body of work; it’s a mix of old and new pieces, right?
Yeah, there's a few pieces, like that bullet hole from 20 years ago, or the Marilyn painting from 12 years ago…
What was the reasoning behind including those pieces?
Well, Matt wanted to include things that people would be familiar with, and then the new work was meant to relate in some way. Show things that are current, but also have work that could draw a line from the past to the present. Matt was referring to it as a remix.
Some of these shaped canvases, I've been working on a series with those shapes for many years — like these trees, the flower, and even the snowman — but they're new. Then the last painting of the show is the burning palm tree, it's a painting on a photograph from the recent fires that happened in Los Angeles. To be honest, I don't usually paint on current events like that, but every now and then I do. I usually paint things with a little more historical distance because it takes time to understand why an image has historical longevity — you understand things in the past different than you understand them in the present, and I usually come across some kind of event when it's already part of history, that was different. But if you squint your eyes at the silhouette of the palm tree, it's the same as a bullet hole. It's like a loose relationship, but the relationships between the artworks is where the opportunity is, in a [space] like this. You can connect things that are extremely diverse, put them together in the rooms and they relate to one another extremely well. So that was kind of how the thinking around the show came together.
How would you say this body of work represents you as an artist at this moment in time?
Good question… I don't know. A palm tree midlife crisis? Some of the iconography in the paintings is like stepping away from my previous series, which was about golf. I'm still kind of working on that series but the palm tree was sort of like a tiny part of a larger image that I was painting before in a different series. And I didn't want those golf paintings here because I just did a commercial show of them in Los Angeles last September. I wanted to do something different here because it's across the world, it's an opportunity to take a different approach and showcase something different.
Even though we're far away from where I did my last show, people still receive all the information in the same way. And I noticed that the palm tree from my imagery related to my golf courses — like I got a new little protagonist. I was just fucking around. I was experimenting. I thought it was funny to paint the palm tree on the other tree, change the colours… try to spread out from the previous material and see where it goes. I was just doing it as a way of moving on from one series, in a way that was just an exploration. The things that Matt liked went in that direction because he was curating the exhibition. It was fun because there's that painting of the cross — I never thought I would be showing that. Most of my art dealers don't even wanna look at that, but Matt was into it, the gallery was into it, so we got to bring that.
Doing an exhibition in Japan can allow artists to experiment in a completely different way to anywhere else, because the art scene here exists in a very different way to the US or anywhere else in the world. People are also more passive aggressive here, which means if you show something that questions society it’s more likely you won’t get called out on it. Or perhaps the art gets more misinterpreted, as a whole.
I was enjoying putting this show together, and I'm not expressing anything about the Catholic religion. It was more like, can you use this extremely simplistic form. which is ubiquitous, and can you make a painting with that? It’s a challenge — I don't know if I can, I'm gonna try that.
The words came later in my struggle to make a painting on the cross-form, but it was like… it would be the same as if you said, 'I'm gonna take this Nike swoosh and see if I can make a painting.’ You know, this is my format, that was the experiment, like, can you do it? Is it gonna be beautiful or interesting? Is it meaningful?
Where did the the idea for the golf series come about? Do you play golf?
I made one painting of a golf course in 2012, it was like an image that had been printed really small in some publication — one of those weeklies like The Economist that has tiny pictures in it to illustrate a story. I don't actually remember which publication, but it was this little image of an aerial view of a golf course in Dubai or somewhere where it's extremely unnatural to have one. It takes a lot of re-appropriated resources to make this happen and sustain it. And I'm doing history painting — this is our world now, golf courses where they don't even have water. What the fuck?! Now there's this super green manicured situation, and it was about that. It was about not having amnesia about the fact that this is how our world is.
So that was 2012, and then in 2018 I did a show of these paintings that are shaped like the American map. It was like a bunch of them but I wanted one painting to be a counterpoint for the maps, and because of the Donald Trump shit — actually all American presidents — they all pose on the golf course all the time. The one painting that's not gonna be a map, it was gonna be a golf course. That was my second time doing it, but over the years I had really wanted to pursue it as an idea, because if you look at them from above, the aerial view, the language of the way the green forms go, and then the sand trap, they look like surrealist modernism. I thought that was funny, cause that's not what that shit is about, it's not surreal. I visited a golf course recently and it's pure pleasure for the people that are into that, the golf people. It was a very private, expensive place, with the clubhouse, a lot of money. The dudes there had the biggest smiles on their faces — it would be like if basketball was your favourite thing and you were at Madison Square Garden. That's how they looked to be at this place, you know, it's not an intellectual place, but they love it.
So it's definitely not surrealism, but it’s idiosyncratic — I wanna use golf courses as a template to investigate that artistic language, where people read it like those shapes from that period, even though they have nothing to do with each other. I like that.
So then I started going with it and they came out how they came out. [Some of them look like] science fiction; the long shadow, the person there, it's very existential, like, ‘the fuck am I doing here in this sand pit on the edge of the world’ — even though in reality that person is probably just stoked, but it looks like it holds a different feeling when it's isolated.
But no, I've never played golf. It’s not something that I was ever interested in.
The reason why I asked is because a lot of people around me started getting into golf.
Oh, I know a bunch of people. A lot of skateboarders get into golf. All the people I know that are into golf are skateboarders. I'm not into it, but everybody's getting into it, and I didn't know until I started working on it. And then there's another thing — in some places it's not like the shitty exclusive thing. Like where it comes from in Scotland, everybody does it. It's like the people's thing. The places are public and they're less manicured, more wild. So if I lived somewhere like that, maybe I would end up doing it, just to spend time with somebody.
It's interesting if you use Google Earth to look over Southern California, where there's ostensibly very little water. You fucking see golf courses everywhere! There’s a permanent drought, and there are golf courses everywhere. People really are into this, it’s crazy.
I think there are obvious reasons why I'm interested in that, thematically. But, you know, golf critiques itself. I'm not trying to say ‘save water, fuck golf.’ Art's not doing that, and to be honest the exclusivity inherent in the unregulated capitalist system of the art world is not creating a stage where you can critique another fucked up scene. You don't need a fancy expensive painting to tell you what you need to know, critically thinking about this sport phenomenon. It was more like I was exploring whether I can make interesting paintings out of this type of subject.
Do you feel because it’s your first time doing a show in Tokyo your perspective and approach is different to normal?
I'm pretty excited to be here. Part of coming here to do a show for the first time is that I wanted to present a lot of different aspects. I've been doing this for like 20 years, showing paintings, but never here, so I wanted to be like, these are some of the things I do. I didn't want it to be like one thing, I wanted it to be a group of things. I guess my last show was in Los Angeles, but that just felt like another arm of New York. This is different, taking the paintings this far, it’s meaningful to me. It's like, images go everywhere, but paintings don’t. Another thing is, I know a lot of people here but I don't come here often, so in terms of that it's exciting and I wanted to have a very substantial offering. This gallery is big. It's very well built, it’s nice and a good space.
The art world is very different here.
I like it though, I feel like I'm meeting a lot of people. The art world's big and corporate where I live, so this is fun for me. You still have this sense that everybody just really likes art and that's why we're doing it. Which is also true at home, but it's not the overwhelming feeling that you have because it's everybody's work. I like the small feeling, it's fun. It reminds me of what the art world was like when I first got in it. I fuck with that.
This Neighborhood’s Changed is on view at Gallery Common until May 25, 2025.
Gallery Common
B1F 5-39-6 Jingumae
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
150-0001, Japan