A Humble Journeyman

In the early ’90s, Rick Lowe abandoned painting to pursue the more pragmatic work of Project Row Houses, restoring 1930s shotgun houses in Houston’s Third Ward for use as artists’ studios and residences for single mothers. With Meditations on Social Sculpture, which had a concise run at Gagosian this fall, Lowe has made the leap from ersatz urban planner to urban cartographer. The journey from social practice (the artist is ambivalent about the term) to blue-chip Westside gallery is an odd one, but Lowe’s layered cartographic decoupages were excellent paintings in which the intimacy and alienation, the excess and poverty, the reason and chaos of the withered burghers of the twenty-first century was manifest.