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Exterior of David Zwirner's gallery on West 19th Street in Chelsea, New York

David Zwirner · Chelsea

Nate Lowman: Hanging Out

Ended10 September 2026 – 24 October 2026·Free

This exhibition has ended.

New shaped canvases, paintings, and works on paper, including key-shaped pieces, in which Lowman reworks imagery from art history, news, and pop culture to probe access and exclusion.

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When Lowman was new in New York, friends gave him a copy of their house key, patterned with yellow-and-blue rave smiley faces, so he would have somewhere to stay. A copy of a friend's key is still the best housing deal in the city.

You walk into a room where every canvas is cut in the shape of a key, four to six and a half feet tall. Five are silkscreened photographs of real keys, with raw canvas left as the frame. Others carry hardware-store novelty patterns, Greek graffiti or names scratched into a bench in Rio. One is his own front-door key. Lowman told the Brooklyn Rail he dropped every other idea to make "a quiet, slow experience". The series also honors his late friend Benjamin Cho, whose 2008 dress hung with keyrings.

Go if you like one shape repeated with a new surface each time. Entry is free, no booking, at 519 West 19th Street, Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, until 24 October.

Look for

  • Nobody's Home (2026)

    A silkscreen diptych of an advertisement showing two blank keys, not yet cut into their final shape.

  • Bouboulinamou (2026)

    Look for scratchy graffiti Lowman photographed by the closed Bouboulina Museum on Spetses; he can't read Greek, so he painted it as pure marks.

  • The Rio bench key

    Names carved into a bench in a Rio de Janeiro botanical garden, painted onto the shape of a close friend's emergency spare.

  • The five silkscreened keys

    Photographs of real keys printed at scale, with the sides taped off so the bare raw canvas around them acts as the frame.

Good for

  • Cheap Culture
  • Going Solo
  • Rainy Days

Skip if

You want variety: every painting in the show is the same shape, a key.

Also at David Zwirner

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