Jean Lowe / Untitled Art Houston
October 1 - 4, 2026
VIP Press Preview:
Thursday October 1, 3 - 9 PM
General Admission:
Friday, October 2
Saturday, October 3: 11 AM - 7 PM
Sunday, October 4: 11 AM - 5 PM
George R. Brown Convention Center, Hall A3, 1001 Avenida De Las Americas, Houston, TX
Hannah Sloan Presents / Booth C11
Press Release
Hannah Sloan Presents is pleased to feature a solo presentation by Southern California artist, Jean Lowe, at Untitled Art, Houston 2026.
Jean Lowe (b. 1960, Eureka, CA) creates swashbuckling paintings, juicy papier-mâché sculptures, and elaborate installations in a comically faux Baroque flamboyance. Combining classical art history with contemporary culture, Lowe uses humor, ornament, and visual puns to examine cultural values, environmental politics, and gendered spaces. Where Claes Oldenburg transformed everyday objects into drippy soft sculpture, Lowe turns the language of high art and luxury into playful symbols and metaphors. For Untitled, Lowe transforms our booth into a theatrical environment that is equal parts Baroque salon, rug emporium, and art-market critique. Every element is conceived and made by the artist: lush, large- scale floral paintings, handmade papier-mâché rugs, a marquetry table, a vase bursting with blossoms, a potted plant, and a painted carpet designed to be walked upon.
At the center of the presentation are Lowe’s exuberant floral paintings, inspired by the Dutch Golden Age tradition of still life and the work of Rachel Ruysch. Enlarged to heroic scale, her flowers are anything but delicate: they stomp, swell, and erupt across the canvas, balancing sensuality and humor with the traditional still- life themes of desire, mortality, and transience. Their reference to the tulip mania of the 1630s, history’s first recorded speculative bubble, introduces a pointed meditation on value, desire, and commerce. Lowe extends these ideas into the space itself. Carpets, furniture, plants, and domestic objects traditionally associated with luxury and refinement are transformed through humble materials and exaggerated artifice. The installation pointedly includes a lusciously painted rug on the floor, a nod towards their frequent inclusion in Dutch paintings, but also a sly symbol of the colloquial “rug salesman,” perhaps an oblique indictment of the art market itself. The result is an environment that is seductive, absurd, and self-aware—a celebration of visual pleasure that doubles as a playful critique of consumption, status, and the systems of value shaping art buying behaviors.
Press inquiries can be directed to Diana Fitzgibbon at diana@hannahsloan.com.
/ About
Jean Lowe’s work is rooted in a “conceptual/decorative” artistic tradition. She engages with specific social and political subject matter—particularly our relationship with other species and the environment, and the role of gender within these dynamics—while employing a visual aesthetic that is generous, decoratively informed, painterly, and installation-oriented. This approach is a pragmatic choice: Lowe uses the visual language of the home to critique the behavior of its inhabitants. By hybridizing elements of installation, historical decoration (particularly from the 17th to 19th centuries), and political and social art traditions, she continues to produce contemporary artwork that is at once entertaining, seductive, and intellectually provocative.
Lowe has received numerous awards and grants including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; a California Arts Council grant; the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Purchase Award; and the CalArts/Alpert Ucross Residency Prize. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla; the California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and University of California, San Francisco. Jean Lowe received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and was a lecturer there until 2008. Her works have been exhibited at museums including Madison Center for the Arts; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. A survey of Lowe’s work, Your Place in the Multiverse, opened at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University in 2021 and traveled to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, in March 2022. Lowe lives and works in Encinitas, CA.
