Nick Lowe

Richard Telles presents new work by Nick Lowe, his first exhibition with the gallery. In a collection of drawings using various dry media, he continues to mine the directness of hand to paper, a practice in which he lets marks fall apart and alternately decides how they fall together.

Terms such as “automatist”, “process”, or “pictographic” come to mind when considering the facture of Lowe's drawings. In this, they reflect the stuff of an intuitive self, where elegant marks proliferate from gradual, additive gestures and/or ingredients to pictorial space. Henri Michaux's mescaline-addled scribbles, or early Jackson Pollack’s works on paper might be seen as antecedents, but to look at them solely through an art historical lens would delimit the peculiarity of Lowe’s hand—and this is not to say his meandering lines and gestures don’t reflect historical flashpoints: they traipse in and out of the frame, contributing to the raucous consistency of these drawings.

Working on many drawings at once, Lowe meditates on the moves he will make by looking at the whole and determining what parts are needed. Each drawing offers its many variations, as if synthesized from multiple temperaments—a process that channels a fair amount of anxiety in that it relies on a series of unknowns. The results often comprise representations of part-objects, visual schema, signs, symbols, and gestural marks coalescing with lunky grace.

Nick Lowe's most recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, California in 2013 and Marc Jancou, New York in 2010. Group exhibitions including Lowe have been held at the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece in 2013, and at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2011. Lowe lives and works in Los Angeles.