Artist Spotlight
Rick Lowe’s extensive body of work in painting, drawing, and installation is paired with numerous collaborative projects, undertaken in the spirit and tradition of “social sculpture.” Working closely with individuals and communities, Lowe has identified myriad ways to exercise creativity in the context of everyday activities, harnessing it to explore concerns around equity and justice. In his paintings and drawings, he has developed a visual language based on aerial photographs of dominoes games that reveal their resemblance to maps of urban districts. By tracing and layering the patterns he discovers, he produces works that, while visually abstract, represent the reconfiguration and movement of communities over time.
Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.
Artist Spotlight: Rick Lowe features a new painting by the artist, related stylistically to his dominoes works and inspired by his ongoing public project in Athens produced in collaboration with Maria Papadimitriou, Victoria Square Project (2016–). For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: Brent Reaney
Behind the Art
Rick Lowe: In the Studio
Join Rick Lowe in his Houston studio as he speaks about his recent paintings, describing their connections to his long engagement with the activity of dominoes and to his community-based projects created in the tradition of social sculpture.
Black Futurity: Lessons in (Art) History to Forge a Path Forward
Jon Copes asks, What can Black History Month mean in the year 2024? He looks to a selection of scholars and artists for the answer.
In Conversation
Rick Lowe, Tom Finkelpearl, and Eugenie Tsai
Join Gagosian for a conversation between Rick Lowe and his longtime friends Tom Finkelpearl, author and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Eugenie Tsai, senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, inside Lowe’s exhibition Meditations on Social Sculpture, at Gagosian, New York. The trio discusses their shared interest in transforming social structures and the evolution of Lowe’s new paintings from his ongoing community projects.
In Conversation
David Adjaye, Rick Lowe, and Thelma Golden
Rick Lowe and Sir David Adjaye join Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, for a conversation on the occasion of the exhibition Social Works at Gagosian, New York. The trio explore Adjaye and Lowe’s shared interests in architecture, community building, and the relationship between space and the Black body.
Social Works: Rick Lowe and Walter Hood
Rick Lowe and Walter Hood speak about Black space, the built environment, and history as a footing for moving forward as part of “Social Works,” a supplement guest edited by Antwaun Sargent for the Summer 2021 issue of the Quarterly.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Related Exhibitions
Related News
In Conversation
Rick Lowe, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Winograd
Friday, April 19, 2024, 3pm
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it
Join Gagosian and Museo di Palazzo Grimani for a conversation between Rick Lowe; Dieter Roelstraete, curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago; and Abigail Winograd, commissioner and curator of the United States Pavilion at the 60th Biennale di Venezia. The talk will take place inside The Arch within the Arc, featuring new paintings by Lowe inspired by the Palazzo’s historic chambers, the urban dynamics of Venice, and the arc as a visual motif. The group will discuss the exhibition in the context of Lowe’s overall practice, as well as Gagosian’s recently published monograph on the artist, which was coedited by Roelstraete and features essays by both curators. The event is free with museum admission; reservations are recommended.
Left: Rick Lowe. Photo: Brent Reaney. Middle: Dieter Roelstraete. Photo: Richard Pilnik. Right: Abigail Winograd. Photo: Cara Romero
Award
Rick Lowe
Posey Leader-In-Residence and Posey Leadership Award 2024
Rick Lowe has been named the Posey Leader-In-Residence and winner of the Posey Leadership Award. As the Posey Leader-In-Residence, Lowe will offer four sessions for students throughout the year touching on different aspects of his work. Formally launched in 2005 and made possible through the generosity of Sally and Lee Posey of Dallas, the Austin College award honors an outstanding individual who has shown great leadership with regard to a humanitarian or educational issue, worked to improve the quality of health, educational, or community services for young people, or created opportunities for the youth within education and social advancement.
Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions, 2021 © Rick Lowe Studio
In Conversation
Rick Lowe
Elyse A. Gonzales
Thursday, November 10, 2022, 7pm
Carver Community Cultural Center, San Antonio
www.rubycity.org
As part of Taller Talks, a series of public talks organized in collaboration by Ruby City and the Carver Community Cultural Center, both in San Antonio, Rick Lowe will discuss his work and process with Ruby City director Elyse A. Gonzales. In 2021 the contemporary art center acquired Lowe’s painting Untitled (2021) and it is currently on view for the first time in the exhibition Tangible/Nothing through July 30, 2023.
Rick Lowe, Untitled, 2021 © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Thomas DuBrock
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
Through May 12, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.org
Multiplicity presents over eighty major collage and collage-informed works by fifty-two living artists. The works reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity, exploring diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. From paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives within our fragmented society. This exhibition originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.
Lauren Halsey, Loda Land, 2020 © Lauren Halsey
On View
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Richard Prince, Untitled, 2015, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut © Richard Prince
On View
Rick Lowe
The Arch within the Arc
Through November 24, 2024
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it
Inspired by the architecture of the Museo di Palazzo Grimani and the urban dynamics of Venice, The Arch within the Arc features new paintings by Rick Lowe that emerged from his consideration of the arch in architecture. Composed with acrylic paint and paper collage on canvas, the vibrant works balance geometric motifs and improvisational techniques. Radiating outward and turning in on themselves, Lowe’s images materialize via a process of painterly construction and deconstruction that evokes infrastructure, mapping, and the experience of moving through the city. The paintings meditate on spatial, temporal, and social relationships, in keeping with the artist’s interest in linking civic practice and visual expression. Presented in collaboration with Gagosian, the exhibition opens immediately prior to the commencement of the 60th Biennale di Venezia.
Installation view, Rick Lowe: The Arch within the Arc, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, April 17–November 24, 2024. Artwork © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Matteo D'Eletto, M3 Studio
On View
Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
Through April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.
Rick Lowe, Fire #4: This Time Athens, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Rick Lowe Studio