Walter Price
Pearl Lines
November 16, 2024–February 1, 2025
616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles
David Zwirner is pleased to present Pearl Lines, the gallery’s first exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Walter Price since the announcement of his representation earlier this year. Marking Price’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Pearl Lines will include paintings from a new body of work that feature recurring motifs from his characteristic visual domain.
Price is known for his richly vibrant paintings and drawings, which bypass strict allegiances to representational or abstract modes. In his work, the artist sensitively employs an idiom of motifs that traverse the real world and the dream world, memory and collective history. Price’s paintings and works on paper not only experiment freely with color, line, and space but also reveal emphatic shifts in perspective, suggesting scenes and imagery that the artist ultimately leaves for viewers to absorb and contemplate on their own. He has given the title Pearl Lines to the majority of his solo presentations, suggesting that each exhibition expands beyond the confines of its own time and place, becoming part of a larger body of work.
In this Los Angeles presentation, Price pays homage to car culture, with its particular relationship to the city and its environs. Across his canvases, sleek automobiles are stamped into rows of busy traffic or delineated by the artist’s hand, their forms splintered and spectral. Trodden footsteps on surfaces bring to mind a foot on the gas pedal. Alternatively, they register a leisurely stroll or a labored gait. The vehicles are at times shrouded in billowing clouds of scumbled paint, other opalescent penumbrae, and showers of dancing stars. The shapes evoke further poetic links with Los Angeles’s other famous exports: Hollywood, its cast of personalities, and its production of artifice.
In Pearl Lines, Price merges points of view while playing with spatial depth. Overstuffed armchairs, contoured by the artist’s signature staccato lines, appear as ghosts from another world. The silhouettes of faces in profile conjure up headshots of enigmatic figures in the shadows. Scarlet flames lick nothing in particular, perhaps suggesting the aftermath of a car accident. A splash of red-orange paint overwhelms a canvas, recalling sunsets on the Pacific Ocean as seen from the freeway.
These warm reds contrast sharply with the prominent blue palette featured in many of these works. Price mines the color’s multitude of timeless and timely associations, invoking such quixotic historical connections in Western art as early cyanotypes, International Klein Blue, artists’ blue periods, and the Virgin Mary’s mantle. The color summons a range of emotional responses like sadness and gloom, peace and calm, while also encompassing its applications in society and its appearance in nature. The obscenities and profanities of blue language. The potent hue of indigo dye. The azure of skies and the aquamarine of seas. The navy blue of the military. The blue-versus-red of conflicting political factions.
Price stretches and expands the bounds of blue as he layers, speckles, and scrapes the color onto his canvases in unorthodox applications, merging and abstracting its symbolism as well as its use in language. The artist quotes an observation from On Being Blue (1976) by the novelist and critic William H. Gass, who writes of the color:
“So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that. A single word, a single thought, a single thing, as Plato taught. We cover our concepts, like fish, with clouds of net. Cops and bobbies wear blue. We catch them and connect. Imagined origins reduce the sounds of clash and contradiction, as when one cries out blue murder in the street.”
1 William H. Gass, On Being Blue (1976; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2014), p. 7.
Image: Walter Price, Both addicted and trapped, 2024. © Walter Price. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
