NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner will present new work by Nate Lowman (b. 1979), opening at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street location in New York. The exhibition debuts a body of shaped canvases that take the form of keys–objects freighted with associations of access, security, and exclusion–a new motif for the artist.

Lowman has frequently employed universally recognizable shaped canvases including hearts, tree-shaped air fresheners, poppies, and maps, among others, each produced in iterations with distinct painted surfaces. His key paintings extend this vocabulary, ranging from tightly rendered replicas to more schematic, nearly abstract forms. Some reproduce dissonant photographic imagery taken by the artist; others appropriate the bright, patterned novelty finishes available at hardware stores to distinguish one key from another; whereas another work, a silkscreen diptych, represents two keys yet to be cut into their final shape. The paintings recall distinct art-historical registers—from hard-edged geometric abstraction to loose, gestural markmaking, to the flattened logic of the readymade—each employing a different painterly language on the same recurring form.

Hung serially, the keys enact their own logic of reproducibility and variation, each one a singular modification of a template, like keys themselves. This capacity for endless reproduction gives the key a particular resonance within Lowman’s practice, which has long engaged with the appropriation and recirculation of found imagery. The key is not only a subject for the artist, but also a metaphor for duplication, transfer, and dilution—the same slippage his images undergo as they are copied, recirculated, and subtly altered. These works continue Lowman’s ongoing complication of figuration and abstraction, painting and object, image and meaning.

Keys are indications of access—who is let in, who is kept out, who holds the right to a given space—ideas that carry a particular charge in a moment when security can feel more like a construct than a guarantee, and when the key itself is being nudged toward obsolescence by newer technologies. Even as it recedes from daily use, it persists as something valuable to hold onto: a small object with outsized meaning, handed from one owner to the next, exchanged at a closing, slipped under a door, passed from landlord to tenant, entrusted to a new employee. In New York, where Lowman has lived and worked for three decades, that logic of ownership maps onto real estate as much as anything else: A key becomes its own currency in a city where space is precarious and increasingly out of reach, sustaining a small local economy of twenty-four-hour locksmiths and duplication shops built on the fact that a key exists to be copied.





The key also marks a threshold between public and private. Several works in the series draw directly from Lowman’s own life. In his early years in New York, friends once gave him a copy of their house key—patterned with a rave-culture yellow-and-blue smiley-face motif, in a nod to the smiley-face paintings Lowman was making at the time—so he would have somewhere to stay. Another work reproduces the key to the artist’s current front door, while a third—painted from a photograph he took of names scratched into a bench in a botanical garden in Rio de Janeiro—takes the shape of a close friend’s spare, kept for emergencies. The motif also represents a quieter homage, in that the form was originally prompted by the memory of Lowman’s late friend, the designer Benjamin Cho, who designed an evocative dress in 2008 that was constructed with holes and keyrings. Together, Lowman’s key paintings bring together distinct registers of meaning—formal and symbolic, public and private—opening them up to new associations.

Nate Lowman (b. 1979) deftly mines images culled from art history, the news, and popular media, transforming visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of paintings, sculptures, and installations. Since the early 2000s, the artist has continually pushed the boundaries of his multimedia approach with works that are by turns critical, humorous, political, and poetic. In his work, Lowman stages an encounter with commonplace, universally recognizable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process.

In 2025, the Musée national Eugène Delacroix, Paris, presented a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in conversation with the work of Delacroix. In 2024, a two-person exhibition was held at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, presenting Lowman’s work alongside that of Auguste Rodin.

The artist’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, in 2018. Other solo presentations at public institutions include those at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2017); FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France (2016); Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2015); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2012); Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2009); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2006).

Lowman’s work has also been featured in significant group exhibitions including Copyists, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2025); Day For Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024); A Possible Horizon, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2020); Third Dimension: Works from The Brant Foundation, The Brant Foundation, New York (2019); Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); Second Chances, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015); Themes & Variations: The Empire of Light, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2014); Three Blind Mice, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2014); To Be with Art Is All We Ask, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2012); George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); The Luminous Interval: The D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2011); The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York (2010); Fresh Hell, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); and Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010).

The artist joined David Zwirner in 2019 and had his first solo presentation at the gallery’s London space later that year, followed by a solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2022. In 2024, Nate Lowman: Parking was on view at David Zwirner, Los Angeles. The artist lives and works in New York.

Work by Lowman is held in numerous institutional collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.