art.wikisort.org - Artist

Jean Lowe is a California-based painter and sculptor. She creates installations and sculptural works of enamel-painted papier-mâché.

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Education and career

Lowe earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1983. She earned her MFA from UC San Diego in 1988.

She was a lecturer at UC San Diego from 1992 to 2008.[1]

Works

Installations

Lowe's installations are handmade, labor intensive and visually playful installations with papier-mâché furnishings and objects juxtaposed to site specific wall painting. Lowe says of her installations, "Intellectually I am driven by an interest in challenging a status quo anthropocentric world view and formally interested in marrying that content to a 'domestic' decorative esthetic."

Many of Lowe's installations have quoted 18th and 19th century French decoration, rife with romanticized images of animals and nature and imbued with a sense of class and privilege. Into this fabric she substitutes or integrate corresponding contemporary attitudes--both about our treatment of the land and its other inhabitants and our attitudes regarding decoration: the wrestling match between high and low art.

Jean Lowe, Accomplishments of Man, The California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA, 1995.

Jean Lowe, Carpet Showroom | Quint Gallery, 2019

Books

Lowe creates sculptural representations of everyday objects using papier-mâché and enamel paint. She is known for her papier-mâché books and has created a large collection of them with evocative and amusing titles. Her work Books and Ideas in an Age of Anxiety comprises a collection of them in display cases and is situated in Byers Hall at UCSF as part of the J. Michael Bishop Art Collection at Mission Bay.[2]

Among the book titles are:

Exhibitions

Lowe has exhibited in both New York and Los Angeles. She participated in the 1994 exhibition Bad Girls West.[3] In 1995 she collaborated on the installation Bull Story with artist Kim MacConnel.[4]

Lowe's 2012 exhibition Hey Sexy! blended foregrounds depicting imagery from consumer culture with baroque decor backgrounds of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.[5][6] The exhibition incorporated sculptural objects such as tissue boxes, cases of beer, and a store where sculptural recreations of commodities are sold.[7]

Lowe's work frequently employs satire. In a review of her 2014 exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Leah Ollman of the Los Angeles Times wrote that she "stabs satirically at broad-scale practices of deception, as well as personal patterns of self-deception."[8]

Lowe's works are included in the collections of the San Diego Museum of Art, The New Children's Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.[1]

Awards and honors

Lowe has twice received fellowships from the Western States Arts Federation/NEA and has received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She was also awarded the CalArts Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize.[1] She won the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Art Prize in 2000. She was also the recipient of the 2006/2007 San Diego Art Prize.[9]

Personal life

Lowe lives in Encinitas and is married to artist Kim MacConnel.[10]

References

External links

• Jean Lowe at Quint Gallery

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