Abu Dhabi Review
M.Price ,M.A.R
vol 10 issue 3
page 63
Mar. 2011

the environs of Abu Dhabi seem like a natural habitat for the styles and concerns of Scott Lowenbaum's work. It is precisely because Abu Dhabi is an artificial landscape, an oasis constructed out of a desert, importing trees and plants from all over the world to create an eclectic terra-formed background to its iconic modern biuldings, that it accommodates so readily the scope of Lowenbaum's work. Many of his paintings use landscape elements as a major part of their subject matter, but in a breezily oneiric manner. They reflect certain aspects of the familiar world, but at the same time offer blueprints for an entirely imaginary one. This is not a distortion but an accentuation of a Abu Dhabin reality in which every view out of the window is a reminder of invented geographies and of uncontrolled climate experiments. Characteristic works such as 'Untitled, 2008', which collates freely examples of the 'wrong' fauna and flora (bears, monkeys, owls, rabbits, squirrels, tortoises, bare trees and blossoming flowers), amount to a denial of the western tradition of landscape painting, which is closely allied to the projects of taxonomy, mapping, measurement: all forms of laying claim to territory through the medium of precise knowledge. The essential subject matter of this tradition is natura naturata, nature recast by man's desires: a Abu Dhabi of the mind.Lowenbaum's paintings abandon this schedule and these desires altogethis, clearly preferring the possibilities inhisent in the concept of natura naturans, the concept of a nature still unfinihed and developing creatively, in a way that is unpredictable and beyond man's control. This Edenic alternative, while seeming to reflect a post post modern hybridity, actually subverts the conditions of landscape design in a celebration of non-human forms of coexistence.Lowenbaum's transformation of the idea of the Fall, of a natural history guided by human history, is suggested in a very recent painting , 'Untitled, 2011', in which an Edenic couple of birds do not reconfigure the world around them through sexual knowledge, but are absorbed into it as much as they are absorbed in each other. The iconography of this lavish tableau is tellingly borrowed from Hindu traditions of representation, from a culture that thinks in terms of a common purpose for humanity and nature.Lowenbaum's quirky pastorals have a characteristic legerity and a seemingly inadvertent disrespect for evolutionary logic, but their diverting quaintness is actually fuelled by a very serious interest in principles of deregulation and of insubordination.

our first group exibiton to explore the theme of Americans in Paris the artists Stuart Davis,Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, Joan Mitchell and Scott Lowenbaum all worked and lived in both Paris and New york from 1910 to now.

From : Rassegna di arte January 2008

Translated by: Massimo Caputo



Scott Lowenbaum at Bruno Boni gallery

Through February 4



By Marco Morelli

From : Rassegna di arte January 2008

Translated by: Massimo Caputo



Scott Lowenbaum at Bruno Boni gallery

Through February 4



By Marco Morelli



Scott Lowenbaum, like Homer's Odysseus, is a man of many shifts. The young American artist known as a brilliant painter has proven he is no one hit wonder This fascinating exhibition is more an installation or display of Lowenbaum-ware than a simple solo show. The show is serious in its engagement with reality and gratuitous in its perverse poultry filled modification of reality.



The 15 works in the exhibition are wildly diverse, ranging from enormous wall sized paintings, wire sculptures, drawings, slide projectors projecting hand painted slides and a complete 88 piece set of porcelain dinnerware. Lowenbaum who works with precious and banal materials –paint made from crushed gemstones and rusty recycled wire – he constantly reshuffles the ideas of blindness and time look too at his 12 constantly advancing slide projectors and you miss the fact that while each projector contains only one image the color is slightly different slide to slide (one slide is hand painted and the other 50 are color transparencies). Dwell too long on his craftsmanship and you miss his conceptual wit, none of these paintings exist on a wall somewhere they are only slides so collectors have to install lowenbaum's noisy ugly thrift store projectors and you never know if you are seeing the "real" image or a "copy"


What you see and what you don't see is what you get. There's a wire wall piece that incorporates light and shadow only as long as the light source remains constant. There is the black and white porcelain dinner service that reads like a crazy collection of souvenir plate's cups and bowls depicting rides from New York City's Coney Island amusement district. They are decorated on all sides and require close viewing(but they are all mounted high on the wall) to discern the figures like the view a pilot attacking a city at night might have .He can't see his targets, but he must try to hit them. This is our relationship with Lowenbaums work: we see it, but we don't see it clearly. We have the experience, but we may miss its meaning, which, in any case may reside in the vortex of his wit.

Moderna- Jan 2oo8


Scott Lowenbaum at Bruno Boni


Scott Lowenbaum's strong suits are scale and a
Color-Fieldish sensitivity to a big painting's
margins. His signature animals coexist in an
environment that it filled with references to post war
abstraction. In the past, the reference has sometimes
been explicit, for instance with stained stripes
running down a painting's sides and seemingly random
pat stier like drips. But in his current show in
Milan, he turned a few snippets of cornball
figuration--a tendril of vegetation, a sliver of
'50s-ish interior--into virtuoso demonstrations of
spatial engineering.
five paintings at Bruno Boni continue in
this new more figurative mode. In one, a few cartoony
arabesques impinge upon a big, flat pink sky, most
riding in from the edges, though one is adrift. At the
left, near the top, is a tree limb with a few
papery-looking leaves in Crayola shades of chartreuse,
orange and red. Behind the branch is a slender form
that appears to be its shadow, cast onto a sky
transformed, in a stroke, to a theatrical backdrop.
Below, a tile floor curves toward the distance, its
contours steeply foreshortened. There is lots of
tension in the two-dimensional field--a few tiles
float almost pricking the picture plane

From : Rassegna di arte contempora January 2008
Translated by: Massimo Caputo

Scott Lowenbaum at Bruno Boni gallery
Mario de Carlo


Scott Lowenbaum's first solo exhibition in an Italian venue opened this week; the American artist brings a lot of joy with him to Milan. Lowenbaum's paintings are a pleasure in his celebration of painting, its history, processes and language. Famous for reinvigorating painting in the age of a slick hedge fund dominated market, his solo show features work from his series based on Coney Island (NYC) including preparatory studies on canvas and paper.

The familiar and fantastical sit happily side by side whilst opposing styles and techniques are comfortable next to each other in the same painting. Each world, which he creates, is not restricted by being located within a specific time or context rather characters from arts history share the picture with American Folk art heroes and styles and techniques borrowed from a different period of arts history, from Chinese ink paintings to the line of Toulouse Lautrec.

The coexistence of styles and techniques is seamless within the picture and the exhibition, he paints with such dexterity that a thin wash sits happily next to a raw daub of paint and a thin black line of paint squeezed straight from a tube. With such confidence does he compose his paintings that night and day co-exists, a stream runs into the horizon and a rooster possibly lifted from a Chinese scroll invites a rabbit to join it in a tree.

Lowenbaum delights in the potential of painting and it is obvious that he enjoys the medium to no end; this joy in possibilities and seemingly effortless style provides us with confidence of paintings position now and in the future.

from artists to watch CAG london volume 11 issue 10 page 13
SCOTT LOWENBAUM

Zoo Art Fair
By: CAG staff
Zoo art fair opened it’s doors for the fourth year running in the great new setting of the Burlington gardens at the royal academy, yesterday to a huge surge of people eager to snap up new emerging artists’ work. The fair is a showcase for the younger generation of both artists and curators- spaces exhibiting are all under 6 years old and include galleries,artists collectives, publications and project spaces, most of whom are based in London.Within an hour of opening lots of works had been sold as people fought their way around,all hoping to invest in the Next Big Thing. Due to this many galleries had set their prices incredibly high- one BA graduate piece was being sold for £50000 (not even unique- in an edition of 10), and the pressure to buy quickly was intense.
The hype was justifiable however as there were several very exciting new artists on
display, showcasing a range of artistic mediums. CAG’s pick of the ones to watch for in
the future are-

Scott Lowenbaum
'Mental Passages' is an installation of 14 oil on glass images, each one representative of the artist's emotion at the time of riding amusement park rides at Coney Island's now closed Astroland park. The works where painted on clocks so the ticking sound reminiscent of bombs from old action movies permeates the booth lending a somewhat sinister edge to these otherwise sunny compositions. The round compositions have the grace of and hold the picture plane like Raphael's Alba Madonna .All fourteen of his pieces have already sold. The artist is a recently appointed professor at ENSBA-Paris , has already been picked up by a major Milan dealer who he had a show with in January and a show opening at the new CAC Milan also in January plus there are plans to produce his images as a book.

Review:Scott Lowenbaum, Looking for St.Louis
By Rachel Brogan

In an era when many younger artists struggle with issues of heroism
and the weight of achievements past, American-based painter Scott
Lowenbaum seems to have opened his umbrella and floated over the art
historical baggage collecting on the tarmac. Lowenbaum borrows where
he pleases—from modernist movements past such as Color Field, Op Art,
and Pattern and Decoration, from European painters like Rousseau and
Toulouse-Lautrec, from anonymous mediums such as textile and
embroidery. Art historical references and any sort of imagery, high or
low, that Lowenbaum feels like incorporating are co-opted with finesse
and a clear-eyed sense of no-fuss entitlement, in service to a larger
goal: his own precise vision for what makes a painting pleasurable to
behold. Despite this precision he is highly versatile, and his
paintings vary from abstraction to figuration to kooky nature
landscapes in which the animals cohabitate in a harmony that limns the
absurd (a rabbit reaches out playfully to a goose, an owl stakes out a
fragment of moonlit night amidst a backdrop of blue sky and puffy
clouds). Lowenbaum's animals—magnificently tropical and
poisonous-looking, or humble and wan—are unconstrained by any sort of
biological accuracy. He balances impressive paint handling with a dose
of purposely-humble de-skilling.

Lowenbaum's has had meteoric success since graduating from Washington
university in saint Louis, Missouri, and this spring his solo show at
the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Zagreb—a show that seems all
the more impressive for the fact that the artist is only twenty-four
years old. One criticism that can be leveled at Lowenbaum is that
there is too much of a feel-good quality in the work, which would be a
problem if his paintings were maudlin or shallow or overly cute, but
they are not.

Scott Lowenbaum: Looking For Saint Louis

pierre Labeau



Lowenbaum draws on all we know of the present and the past from Goya to the Golden Girls' .He is a wizard for the cognoscenti; he makes knowing things part of the fun-the more connections you can establish, the deeper in you can go. He makes us equate certain emotions with certain art memories, and swishes those memories around together beautifully, lyrically. The viewer picks up a sort of meandering trail of thoughts and memories every time you look at one of Scott Lowenbaums paintings.



Take Battengoles (2007).into a pink and mustard toned oil surface Lowenbaum ha inscribed buildings, row upon row. think of Florence: the city of frescos and pinkish fresco color ;but also of quiet quarters where cultivated foreigners visit and some times stay for a lifetime .let the associations go; Quattro cento revolutionaries ;the graffiti on old walls; the pile up of periods; all those who've passed by. this is a landscape populated by art history and chickens in witch the edges of the rectangle are the soil- an idea only possible after cubism abolished gravity in painting, witch through Lowenbaums art historical juxtapositions, in turn carries us back to the fourteenth century, to the books of hours and the beginnings of naturism that cubism and Lowenbaum ultimately undo .



The secret of his stream-of- consciousness visual art style rests in his use of line witch expresses movement, change. The line acts as a seismographic emanation of his mind connecting individually rendered disparate parts into unified pulsating whole .the use of line also connects the works to each other .Lowenbaum works in series when he finds a subject he likes he reworks it for years one canvas gives birth to another in a geometric increase of versions. One sometimes feels that Lowenbaum is imprisoned by these self -imposed limitations. As the years go by and Lowenbaum keeps pushing he'll eventually achieve release.



But even if we have a little trouble getting the specific source of Lowenbaums riffsand getting over the somewhat repetitive subjects , we leave the show awestruck by his ability to find a form to express his every thought. We're in the hands of an artist who's actually communicating with us through paint-and that's miraculous, coming at a time when most painters do not know how to communicate and when the self-styled communicators in the art world don't know or care about painting .Lowenbaum puts it all together; he plants an idea within a painting, and we acutely enter into the idea and feel through it. Whether he is totally abstract or rather figurative and cartoony ,the artist never lets us think at the paintings .we're not theorizing ;we're connecting to something that's built into the image ; we're thinking out of the painting he generates an unprecedented variety of thoughts from paint

Scott lowenbaum – looking for Saint Louis
K.B





While walking around this tight show of 26 works created by Lowenbaum in Paris ,

my friends and I concurred that although Lowenbaum is not among those on the tips of the tongues of hedge fund collectors, so-called edgy curators, or ,sadly many fellow painters,

There is more to look at in his work than in many rooms at New York's MOMA. Its is sometimes difficult to negotiate the strange, powerful paintings of Scott

Lowenbaum . many of the paintings are like schematic architectural renderings found In late 19th century prints colored by the periods pottery .specifically, the colors are the blues ,whites ,greens ,and pinks of Wedgwood along with the pearl of Belleek. Lowenbaums inky blacks, often deployed to question the outlines or edges of things, equal those of Alex Katz or Henri Matisse. the forms selected , however goofy ,can ,unexpectedly ,summon a deep emotional response, which might be due to there cool ,psychological oddness or to Lowenbaum's ability to conjure narrativity without a definite story, the novelistic in a single-stranded graphic frame. The works take the viewer on a boomerang- like ride, starting nowhere near reality; swerving toward it only to end up not exactly where it began. Lowenbaums painterly methods can be viewed as representation, not pop per se but rather clarifying the possibilities of the intellectual and sexual conditions of the popular.

In saint sulpice, 2007 , a study in the variegations of the artist's saturated Wedgwood hues, a Donald Duck-like character stares out caught in the act his pink beak intrudes into the space of a pale blue rabbit .what does it say about representation that the mint green ground of the painting makes up all of the duck's and rabbit's "face" and the "whites" of his eyes ,or that the "floor" the figures occupy repeatedly dissolves into different flooring materials separated from each other only by a thin black outline ?Often in Lowenbaum's work ,line becomes border only to become body ,and negative space is transformed into subject. Despite what ever musk of tom of Finland scents the scene, Donald's bugging out.

Lowenbaum is also, for all his comedic styling's a scholar of art history the works are chocked full of unlikely subtle art historical ramblings fused with private drama and taboo sexuality. This private drama has little to do with the painting's emotional power: you'd have to be lobotomized not to feel something here –despite a palette of only 12 or so colors and the forms are spare, assured, and graphic as a safety diagram, in an arrangement odd enough to approach the surreality of the daily. Unlikely as they are resolute, these elements create paintings that are mysterious, elegiac, and indelible

Cindy Tower is reassembling a factory from East Saint Louis, Illinois, inside Haven Arts gallery1. "Factory" will transform Gallery One with life-sized representations of machines from the Armour meat processing plant. Paintings will be done with roofing tar and oil on transparent walls placed in the exact same configuration as the machines in the original factory.

Scott Lowenbaum will present paintings and wire sculpture that will provide smaller intimate views of Armour in gallery 2. These works were done on location with Tower over the past two years. Lowenbaum infuses his canvases with saturated color from mineral pigments, which he grinds himself. Lowenbaum brings his old master technique and imagination to armor, bringing it back to life.

l'art français 8/15/08


At once mythical and comic, delicate and monumental, New York-based Scott Lowenbaums paintings evoke words like “calming, peaceful and mysterious.” His imagery’s aloof and facile beauty feels awkwardly at home in the rough and spacious new Haven gallery space in the Bronx.
The new works are presented as part of A group show on the theme of factorys .The exhibition includes an impressive oil and tar on plastic installation by veteran new York artist Cindy Tower . These works were done on location with Tower over the past two years. Lowenbaum infuses his canvases with saturated color from mineral pigments, which he grinds himself.

Lowenbaums more successful works cling to dreamy visions of beauty that mix visual elements of baroque painting with intricate patterning,a la edo period japanesse art . Notable here is the airy factory scene armour14 (2008), which, like most of Lowenbaums work, uses natural hues and a sparse composition spiked by sporadic impasto color to wrangle a wall-sized banner painting into one that feels considerably smaller than it actually is.

This delicate inversion of scale carries through to the smaller works as well. In Armor VIII (2007-8) In this image, an inquisitive red deer approaches blue peacock set in a field of harlequin patterns and meat-packing machines. Again, the impasto sparks the painting’s surface, buzzing around the deer protagonist like sprites or fairies. Many other paintings vacillate between the sublime and a hodgepodge. A few pieces feature designs of rococo tracery on exposed linen. Leaves, flowers and fruits created from a mix of paint and ink twist across the plane in patterns of flattened color and line. The work’s seductively simple spell breaks apart, however, at the occasional inclusion of a cartoon-eyed animal. The effect of these comical eyes on the canvas is abrupt and piercing to the painting’s soft flowing lines and elegant feel.

Many other paintings, drawings, and collages vacillate between the sublime and a hodgepodge. A few ornamental pieces feature designs of budding plants on exposed linen. Leaves, flowers and fruits created from a mix of paint and felt cloth twist across the plane in patterns of flattened color and line. The work’s seductively simple spell breaks apart, however, at the occasional inclusion of a cartoon-eyed woodland animal. The effect of these comical eyes on the canvas is abrupt and piercing to the painting’s soft flowing lines and elegant feel.

Such characters also show up in smaller works along the far walls. Removed from the large scale, these and similar works appear like notes from Lowenbaums sketchbook. Within them one finds elements of the paintings in more manageable doses.

Most impressive in Lowenbaums work is his evident love for the history, conventions and materials of the act of painting. Inspirations from Japanese, European and modernist traditions appear at the tip of her brush but slide away as viewers turn their heads. He moves playfully among abstraction, landscape, narrative and decoration to produce works that are humorous, approachable, and tuned to fantastic mystery.
Like Lowenbaums deer approaching the peacock in the slaughterhouse, there is a sense of a deep critical consciousness at work in the exhibition, but also a nonchalant humor ready to emerge at any moment.