Jean Lowe | Untitled (Light & Space #4)
Current exhibition
Overview
Jean Lowe
Untitled (Light and Space #4), 2023
casein on wood panel
72 x 216 in
182.9 x 548.6 cm
182.9 x 548.6 cm
Jean Lowe is known for mining popular culture, consumerism, environmentalism, politics, and art history in her tongue-in-cheek installation, painting, and sculpture practice. In Untitled (Light and Space #4), the artist renders an 18'-wide panoramic view of the Concert Room in the Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Germany. Commissioned as a pleasure palace in 1745 by Frederick the Great, the extravagant music quarters are enveloped in gilded mirrors and ornate filigree, in addition to panels depicting the mythological stories from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. Lowe's over-the-top approach upends the traditional hierarchies of contemporary artmaking and makes the case that movements as disparate as the Rococo and Light & Space may share some qualities related to the observer's experience. In an art world that revels in the seriousness of the Light & Space, Lowe leans into the vanity and maximalism of its opposite while exploring the capacity of working with space and considering those who inhabit it.
Lowe received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. A survey of Lowe’s work, Your Place in the Multiverse, opened at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University in 2021 and traveled to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, in 2022. She has exhibited across numerous other museums such as the Madison Center for the Arts Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA; Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA; California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido, CA; Prudential Corporation; San Diego Children’s Museum; San Diego Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, La Jolla; Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan; 21C Museum Hotel, Louisville, KY; and University of California, San Francisco. She has received numerous awards and grants including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; a California Arts Council grant; the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Purchase Award; and the CalArts/Alpert Ucross Residency Prize. Lowe lives and works in Encinitas, CA.
Selected Works
