Jean Lowe: Something Awesome is Headed Your Way
Past exhibition
Overview
Opening Reception: Saturday July 12, 5-8PM
Quint Gallery is pleased to present a one-week-only exhibition of a new painting by Jean Lowe at ONE in Logan Heights. An opening reception will coincide with DOWN WITH THE HIERARCHY!, Lowe’s collaborative exhibition with Abraham Razo (Rancholo) and Kim MacConnel at Best Practice. Both exhibitions open on Saturday, July 12 from 5-8pm at 1955 Julian Avenue inside the Bread & Salt building.
Something Awesome is Headed Your Way (After Seghers) is a playful interpretation of the 17th-century tradition of Dutch flower painting. Through examining the assignment of value to beauty and excess across the decorative arts of Early Modern Europe, Lowe’s works often comment on issues of today with the same degree of exaggeration. In context, this era in Holland was marked by rapid developments across the arts and sciences, in part funded by the wealth and power gained from their violent colonization tactics across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In the mid 1600s, "Tulipmania" reached its height, crashing a speculative bubble of insatiable demand and cost inflation for the flowers. This era of the tulip as a status symbol was represented by the many Dutch artists that painted remarkably-detailed still lifes of flower arrangements set against a dark backdrop, often included with other rare flowers or fruits imported from Dutch colonies. At the same time, the Vanitas genre was also flourishing, using recurring motifs like skulls and decaying fruit as a reminder of the certainty of death and worthlessness of material possessions. While the flower paintings suggested birth and fertility on the surface, what lurked beneath was the fleeting nature of life and its vanities.
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
