PRESENTATION: Walter Price-Pearl Lines

Walter Price, “It got uncomfortable, immediately!”, 2022. Collection of Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard. Courtesy the artist and The Modern InstituteWorking in painting and drawing, Walter Price’s recent works have been concerned with what he describes as the various rhythms and cadences of the environments he has travelled. He attempts to disrupt and reconcile what he describes as a ‘wrongness’ in painting by questioning its conventions from the viewing experience to the materials and techniques he might employ within a work.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Walker Art Center Archive

Walter Price isn’t afraid of color. Instead, he sees freedom and joy in its endless possibilities. One glimpse at his exuberant canvases, which burst with lush, vivid hues, make this perspective abundantly clear. In his solo exhibition “Pearl Lines” he presents 25 paintings which blur the boundaries between figuration and abstraction and draw viewers into his singular visual world. Titled “Walter Price: Pearl Lines”, the exhibition represents the most in-depth museum exploration of the artist’s practice to-date, and features selections from significant bodies of work produced between 2017 and 2023, including a painting acquired by the Walker Art Center in 2020 that is on public display for the first time. Price began his journey to art in the U.S. Navy. Like generations of artists before him, Price’s military service allowed him to pursue an arts education through the G.I. Bill. Practicing his skills in his Brooklyn studio where he relocated in 2013, Price focused on interior spaces depicted at a small scale, which have continued to serve as a platform for his wide-ranging formal and conceptual explorations. His fluid compositions feature everyday objects, figures, and domestic motifs emerging from and obstructed by rich swaths of color, tangles of lines, and abstract marks and symbols. This distinct fusion of figuration and abstraction gives his work the aura of a surreal dreamscape, both familiar and foreign. The open-endedness of his visual language is precisely the point, as he creates the framework for viewers to complete the narrative possibilities from their own experiences and viewpoints. This sensibility also manifests in his many drawings, which he creates as studies for his paintings and as discrete works for art. While the exhibition does not include any examples of his works on paper, this aspect of his practice is also invoked in the exhibition its title, alluding to the beauty of drawing and its importance to his artistic vision. The same exhibition title has been used by Price for the majority of his solo exhibitions since 2016. It points to the continuity between his paintings and drawings, which he often creates as ongoing series with subtle formal and conceptual variations between the featured works, as well as to the repetitive, ritualistic qualities of his practice. Price’s work also often engages with history, race, and cultural consciousness. Many of his paintings reference socio-political and cultural happenings—past and present—while also denying the viewer any clear articulation of particular events. In this way, Price rejects simple representation in favor of a more complex network of evocations that communicate both tangible experience and broader emotional and sensorial expressions. His work is at once specific and open-ended; representational and abstract; individual and communal. This approach builds on the legacies of such artists as Henry Taylor and Jacob Lawrence, and also gives Price the freedom to pursue formal experimentation. It also reflects how Price sees himself as an artist: a painter first and foremost, exploring the possibilities of paint and painting. This is an important facet of his vision, which pushes against a common notion that Black artists should focus on narrating or expressing the Black experience. The exhibition includes a broad spectrum of works, capturing Price’s prolific practice. Among the works are a selection of smaller-scale paintings, produced in 2020, including “Hold the umbrella tight while viewing my rain”, “They don’t LOVE you” and “So much intellectual work to remain wrong”. The works were made, in part, during a residency at Camden Art Center and represent a rare engagement with the color white, which creates a rhythmic throughline across the paintings. These works also highlight Price’s ability to work at a smaller scale without losing the potency of his visual vocabulary and formal style. The exhibition also includes works produced at a monumental scale, such as “Global Outcry” (2018-2020) and “It got uncomfortable, immediately!” (2022), among numerous others. Both paintings emerged from darker imagery, including the perils of fake news cycles in the former and the greed elicited by pandemic in the latter. In each instance, Price used the subjects to engage in a painterly exploration of color, line, and form to work through these ideas and the sensations that they evoke. The ehibition also includes “Step into the Spotlight” (2018), a painting from the Walker’s collection that is shown for the first time alongside “Earth mother” (2018) and “Pleasure the false God” (2018). Price began this series of paintings when he was experimenting with transitioning from smaller to larger formats, seeking to infuse elements from his smaller compositions into pieces centered around a single figure. The creation of the works also coincided with a media controversy stemming from comparisons between US tennis icon Serena Williams and a male counterpart. Perplexed by society’s tendency to equate femininity with weakness, Price was inspired to create this series of large-scale paintings reminiscent of statues and sports trophies. The series, featuring figures suggestive of running, marching, or poised to leap out of the canvas, was meticulously constructed from the bottom-up, deliberately distorting perspectives to approach figuration through painterly abstraction.

Photo: Walter Price, “It got uncomfortable, immediately!”, 2022. Collection of Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute

Info: Curator: Rosario Güiraldes, Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN, USA, Duration: 8/8-8/12/2024, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, https://walkerart.org/

Walter Price, Step into the Spotlight, 2018. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.Edward R. Bazinet Charitable Foundation, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Walter Price, Step into the Spotlight, 2018. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Edward R. Bazinet Charitable Foundation, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

 

 

Walter Price, Hold the umbrella tight while viewing my rain, 2020. Collection Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali
Walter Price, Hold the umbrella tight while viewing my rain, 2020. Collection Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali

 

 

Walter Price, Square. Box. A foundation of intellectualism, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Walter Price, Square. Box. A foundation of intellectualism, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

 

 

Walter Price, They don't LOVE you, Yet, 2020. Collection Meg and David Roth, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali
Walter Price, They don’t LOVE you, Yet, 2020. Collection Meg and David Roth, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali

 

 

Walter Price, Swoosh, 2020. Collection Richard Mumby, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali
Walter Price, Swoosh, 2020. Collection Richard Mumby, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali

 

 

Walter Price, So much intellectual work to remain wrong, 2020. Private collection, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali
Walter Price, So much intellectual work to remain wrong, 2020. Private collection, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali

 

 

Walter Price, There’s a river in the ocean, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Walter Price, There’s a river in the ocean, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

 

 

Walter Price, Star spangled, 2023. Collection of Simone Leigh, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Walter Price, Star spangled, 2023. Collection of Simone Leigh, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York