GSTAAD.- Gagosian announced In Search of Light, an exhibition of new works by Rick Lowe in Gstaad. The artist’s debut presentation in Switzerland, it introduces new series of drawings and paintings on paper and features Lowe’s latest large-scale painting.

Lowe’s practice centers on interpreting and transforming shared structures and sites, using community-based projects to catalyze change. Drawn, painted, and collaged, his abstractions complement these initiatives, taking games of dominoes as starting points from which to consider relationships between people and places. Paper is a key material for Lowe, whose works on paper function both as autonomous artworks and as a way to explore varied modes of abstraction. In search of light, Lowe explores the dynamic and associative effects of color and tone in works that are distinguished by a bright, saturated palette and emphasize dramatic contrasts of light and dark.

The works on paper exhibited in Gstaad were completed this year, developing previous motifs and introducing new ones. In the Glyph Studies drawings, made with graphite on collaged paper, Lowe assembles collections of fragmented linear structures into abstract lexicographies. Intersecting, arcing paths are a key element of Inferno, with its fiery palette, and Becoming, which adds equally vivid cool blues and greens to those warm hues, creating spatial effects that suggest active growth. With nested forms and dynamic boundaries, the Refuge Studies series reflects on taking shelter. Begun as a nonrepresentational work, Lycabettus Hill approximates the profile of the titular Athens landmark illuminated by the rising sun. A series of Finding Form works is composed with a dense grid of colorful brushstrokes interrupted by patches of white that reveal the paper support.

Spanning 18 feet (5.5 meters) in length, Ragtag-ish (2024) is the latest of Lowe’s large-scale paintings. This expansive work is traversed by meandering curves enmeshed within intricate networks of linear shapes, bringing together elements developed through his works on paper.

The exhibition in Gstaad is preceded by The Arch within the Arch, an exhibition on view through November 24, 2024, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, which included works rooted in the artist’s consideration of the arch in architecture and on spatial, temporal, and social relationships inspired by historical architecture and the urban dynamics of Venice. In Search of Light also directly follows Lowe’s time as the Roy Lichtenstein Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome from October 8 to November 27, 2024. Lowe has taken the opportunity to explore the city’s built environment and study the central role that the Tiber plays in its geography and civic life.

Rick Lowe was born in 1961 in rural Russell County, Alabama, and lives and works in Houston. Collections include the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Columbus Museum, Georgia; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate, London; and the UBS Art Collection. Solo exhibitions include Art League Houston (2020–21); Notes on the Great Migration, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago (2022–23); Hic sunt dracones (Here Lay Dragons): Mapping the Unknown, Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, Athens (2023); and The Arch within the Arch, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice (2024). He also participated in Documenta 14, Athens (2017). Among Lowe’s numerous community art projects are Project Row Houses, Houston (1993–2018); Watts House Project, Los Angeles (1996–2012); Borough Project (with Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacob), Charleston, South Carolina (2003); Small Business/Big Change, Anyang Public Art Program, Korea (2010); Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow, Dallas (2013); Victoria Square Project, Athens (2017–18); Greenwood Art Project, Tulsa, Oklahoma (2018–21); and Black Wall Street Journey, Chicago (2021–). In 2013 President Barack Obama appointed Lowe to the National Council on the Arts, and in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Lowe is currently a professor of interdisciplinary practice at the University of Houston.