Nate Lowman: Hanging Out at David Zwirner

Nate Lowman (b. 1979), who lives and works in New York, is showing a new body of work at David Zwirner's 19th Street gallery in Chelsea. Hanging Out introduces a motif he has not used before: canvases cut into the shape of keys. The show runs through October 24.

Lowman draws on art history, the news and popular media, turning what he finds into paintings, sculptures and installations. He has often worked with instantly recognizable shaped canvases, among them hearts, tree-shaped air fresheners, poppies and maps, each made in versions with different painted surfaces. The key paintings extend that habit. Some are close replicas of real keys; others are schematic and nearly abstract. A few reproduce photographs the artist took himself, while others borrow the bright patterned covers sold in hardware stores to tell one key from another. Nobody's Home, a silkscreen diptych, is based on an advertisement showing two keys not yet cut to their final shape.

The key suits Lowman's long interest in copying and recirculating images, since a key exists to be duplicated. Hung in sequence, the works read as variations on a single template. Each applies a different painterly language to the same form, with echoes of Frank Stella's hard-edged geometry, Andy Warhol's seriality and the flatness of Duchamp's readymades.

Many of the works come from Lowman's own life. Early in his New York years, friends gave him a copy of their house key, patterned with a yellow-and-blue rave-style smiley face that nodded to the smiley paintings he was making then. Another painting reproduces the key to his current front door. A third, painted from a photograph of names scratched into a bench in a Rio de Janeiro botanical garden, takes the shape of a close friend's emergency spare. Bouboulinamou refers to graffiti he found in the garden of the Bouboulina Museum on the Greek island of Spetses. The form also recalls his late friend, the designer Benjamin Cho, who made a dress in 2008 built from holes and keyrings.

After three decades in New York, Lowman links the key to real estate, ownership and a city where space is hard to come by, supported by twenty-four-hour locksmiths and duplication shops. The works also come at a time when keys are being edged out by newer technologies.

Lowman joined David Zwirner in 2019. In 2025 the Musée national Eugène Delacroix in Paris presented his work in dialogue with Delacroix, and in 2024 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires paired him with Rodin. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Whitney, among others.