Artist: Walter Price
Exhibition title: Pearl Lines
Venue: The Modern Institute, Glasgow, UK
Date: January 27 – March 24, 2018
Photography: All photographs courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow
For New York-based Walter Price’s solo exhibition ‘Pearl Lines’ at The Modern Institute’s Osborne Street location, the artist’s focus on the colour blue transforms the former bathhouse into a dreamlike setting. Engulfed in an interior of a deep ultramarine blue hue– painted walls with a carpet to match their temperature – the gallery space emulates the intimate, yet energetic scenes depicted in Price’s new body of paintings.
Echoing this concentration, the new works are dominated by a range of blue tones, whilst the palette of funky colour combinations Price often employs plays a supporting part in these pieces – however, his approach remains just as spontaneous and charged. The use of texture (smalt, airplane glass beads, and thickly layered paint) is present in some, while others possess a smoother surface – a push and pull Price explores between the works that play with his choice of a more limited palette and deferral of over-abundance in colour.
These paintings continue Price’s interest in working on an intimate scale, creating scenes saturated with personal memories, cultural ciphers, and questions of identity as well as the social. Though inhabited by traces of familiarity – interiors or figures we may recognise – ultimately the works suggest narratives, but with overlapping contradictions. Price’s images elicit a form of recollection, but one you ultimately can’t place, as if a fragment of a delirious, lucid dream.
Walter Price (b. Macon, Georgia in 1989, lives and works in New York). Selected exhibitions include: ‘Fictions’, The Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2017); ‘89Plus: Americans’, LUMA Foundation, Zurich (2017); ’99 Cents or Less’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); ‘Zeitgeist’, MAMCO Museé d’Art Moderne, Geneva, Switzerland (2017); ‘Pearl Lines’, Karma, New York (solo, 2016); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (solo, 2016); ‘Before Sunset’, Karma, Amagansett (2016); ‘Hill of Munch’, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2016); ‘Full Spectrum’, Harriet Tubman Museum, Macon, Georgia (2013).
Price will have an upcoming solo exhibition at Karma, New York in 2018, as well as participate in ‘FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art’, Cleveland, Ohio. Price’s first book of drawings ‘Crystal Black’ was published by Karma in 2016
Walter Price, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, Glasgow, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, Glasgow, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, Glasgow, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, Glasgow, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, Glasgow, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, Glasgow, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, the world scare, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 121.9 x 121.9 x 3.8 cm, 48 x 48 x 1.5 in, Installation view ‘Pearl Lines’, The Modern Institute Osborne Street, 2018, Photo: Patrick Jameson
Walter Price, hyperthermic conditioning 2, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 45.72 x 60.96 x 4.13 cm, 18 x 24 x 1.6 in framed
Walter Price, no plastic, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 45.72 x 60.96 x 2.22 cm, 18 x 24 x 0.9 in framed
Walter Price, sugarloaf mountain, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 45.72 x 60.96 x 3.81 cm, 18 x 24 x 1.5 in framed
Walter Price, mind of mind 1, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 76.2 x 101.6 x 3.8 cm, 30 x 40 x 1.5 in framed
Walter Price, champagne flies, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 76.7 x 76.2 x 3.8 cm, 30.2 x 30 x 1.5 in
Walter Price, mind of mind 2, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 76.04 x 101.6 x 3.8 cm, 29.9 x 40 x 1.5 in framed
Walter Price, half young, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 46.51 x 65.08 x 2.54 cm, 18.3 x 25.6 x 1 in framed
Walter Price, merge sort, 2017, Acrylic on wood, 127 x 116.8 x 3.8 cm, 50 x 46 x 1.5 in