Walter Price, Pearl Lines

1 Mar-28 Mar 2024

PV 29 Feb 2024, 6-8pm

Overview

Modern Art is pleased to announce ​‘Pearl Lines’, Walter Price’s first solo exhibition in London since his show at Camden Art Centre in 2021. Across Modern Art’s two London galleries (Helmet Row and Bury Street) he presents a series of new paintings and sculpture. 

Price’s openness to materials, dissolves the boundaries between mediums — in this show he continues to foreground the importance of drawing to his paintings. His work is realised with multiple methods of mark making, including; graphic lines of ink, broad strokes of colour, and impasto stamps of paint. Recurring forms include: people, cartoon characters, armchairs, televisions, palm trees, cars, couches, the sun and brick walls. In a series of new works, domestic spaces act as metaphors for psychological interiors. For a series of works on board, bodies and heads often seen in groups are drawn with ink. Past drawings are wrapped with strips of brown gaffer tape to form new paintings, others he uses as a ground for new paintings with acrylic and gesso. ​‘The Rebuild’, a new sculpture gestures to an exchange that brought about its making. 

At both spaces, Price has painted the walls brown, installing a brown carpet at Helmet Row. Probing our preconceptions of the colour, the brown environment attunes the viewers’ eyes to see more clearly the particular combinations of colours and forms throughout all the works. 

Walter Price was born in Macon, Georgia and lives and works in New York. A solo exhibition of his work will open at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in August 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2022; 2020); Camden Art Centre, London (2021); Aspen Art Museum (2019); MoMA ps1, New York (2018); and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018). His work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; and Rollins Museum of Art, Orlando, among others.

Artists