Alexandre Stipanovich: How was the Art Relax show at Karma Amagansett?
Nate Lowman: It was fun! It came out really good. The show featured all collaborative works of mine with Leo, because you know, we spend so much time together. Sometimes we just sit around and have a few drinks and tell jokes and make collages. He's a super generous person––he always knows what I'm working on, so he always sends me images I might be interested in for research, just like from the Internet or when he travels. He buys me bumper stickers and postcards and all this stuff. We're both pack rats for images and garbage, so this was almost like a spring cleaning show because we turned it all into artworks. So the show was just hung in a really insane way.
AS: You tend to show your pieces in interesting ways, like there's a relaxed approach to the hanging process. At Apex in 2003, for example, you used blue tape to hang the works.
NL: Yeah, that was super intricate though. I’ve reinstalled that piece a few times and it takes days. It’s not as casual as it looks, but some of the materials are, like dirt in the painting or trash glued down.
Sofia Cavallo: What's it like working with Leo, as opposed to other friends you’ve collaborated with?
Nate Lowman: I'm not sure... I did a collaborative project with Dan Colen and we had just gotten this studio together. It was like six years ago. We were more or less living together and spending all our time together––staying up late at night, talking, goofing off, and getting to know each other, and things just came out of conversations that we'd have at weird hours. So that was a unique project for us.
And then I did a collaborative show in 2011 with Rob Pruitt just for fun, and it was just because both of us had this weird relationship to bedbugs. It’s amazing because Rob is so full of ideas that you could start something and it might not ever end. Like we would go shopping at Ikea for bed stuff and we ended up making portraits of one another. So that was a different collaborative process. Rob is also fearless. Like we would walk right up to a mattress on the street for a sculpture that we were gonna do together, and he'd be like "I'm gonna put it in the back of my car," and I’m like, "You can give yourself bedbugs dude!" And he's like, "Nah, I’ll just deal with it," and I’m freaking out like "I’m getting out!" [Laughs] He’s so great.
SC: Would you collaborate with a stranger?
NL: No. I mean, I’d like to say yes, but no. It’s difficult. It’s hard enough to make art and then engage with somebody else's thing, because collaboration shouldn’t feel like a compromise ever––because art shouldn't ever have that. You have to do something that sa