Rick Lowe

Returning to painting with these abstract canvases, Lowe brings ideas from his communal projects to bear on his studio practice. Frequently playing dominoes with community members, he has engineered a visual language based on overhead photographs of the tabletop game, which requires strategy, chance, and speed. Engaging in the pastime across the world, he discovered that players from some cultures arrange the pieces along a single axis, while others do so in four directions. Lowe also noticed visual similarities between the game’s dense, repeating patterns and maps of urban districts, their meandering linear forms reminiscent of streets, blocks, and other infrastructure. Tracing and layering these patterns, he began to produce paintings and drawings with collaged elements that signify the reconfiguration and movement of communities over time, while also suggesting relationships beyond the strictly geographic.

The works in Meditations on Social Sculpture offer, in Lowe’s words, “an opportunity to think about the issues of equity and urban planning in a more conceptual way”; he employs similar approaches in the Project Row Houses and Victoria Square Project paintings, and in other untitled abstractions in the exhibition, which feature variations in mark, palette, and surface texture. In the large-scale diptych Untitled #010722 (2022), luminescent rectangles activate a black ground, imbricated networks emerging from a process of covering and uncovering. Other paintings reflect on elements of their realization, functioning as interpretations of the artist’s social initiatives and explorations of paint itself. Project Row Houses: People and Place (2021), for example, is a meditation on people as fundamental to activating the work for which it is named, while Project Row Houses: Biggers and Beuys (2021) represents Lowe’s struggle with his influences and the complex notion of an artist “creating solutions.”