WALTER PRICE

Early Years

Walter Price was born in 1989 in Macon, Georgia. He enlisted in the US Navy in his early twenties and was stationed in Japan, an experience that would later influence his visual vocabulary. Following his military service, he studied at the Art Institute of Washington and later at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Price’s Southern upbringing, military background, and experience navigating racial identity in America inform the psychological terrain of his artworks. His paintings are often described as interior landscapes—fragments of places, people, and memories rendered with expressive colour and cryptic motifs.

Artworks

Walter Price’s artworks oscillate between abstraction and figuration, blending narrative suggestion with formal experimentation. His contemporary art practice includes painting, works on paper, and mixed-media assemblage.

Symbolic Landscapes and Interior Worlds

In early paintings such as A Mighty Story (2015) and Living on $3 a Day (2016), Price began constructing enigmatic compositions where flat planes of colour host recurring motifs—potted plants, bathtubs, hats, and disembodied heads. These elements, drawn from lived experience and popular culture, are arranged into spatially ambiguous scenes. The works feel both personal and surreal, layered with social commentary and symbolic density. Price uses painting as a tool for psychological mapping, assembling dreamlike interiors that resist linear narrative but remain charged with feeling.

Expansion into Drawing and Works on Paper

Drawing is a central part of Walter Price’s process. His works on paper, often rendered in coloured pencil, ink, or gouache, show a more diaristic and spontaneous side of his practice. Series like Pearl Lines (2018) explore gestural mark-making and text fragments, bridging writing and image. In these artworks, language acts as both visual rhythm and conceptual anchor. The intimacy of scale and material lends these works a sketchbook-like immediacy, while still conveying Price’s thematic preoccupations: memory, social politics, and the instability of perception.

Colour, Composition, and the Unfixed Image

Walter Price’s use of colour is both emotive and disorienting. He often flattens space into blocks of vibrant hue—turquoise, ochre, neon pink—creating compositions that hover between representation and abstraction. In later works such as Pearl Lines I (2020) or The Modernist Conundrum (2022), figural suggestions emerge only to recede into shape and surface. This push and pull between form and formlessness is central to Price’s visual language. It invites viewers to experience his artworks not as narratives to decode, but as environments to inhabit—imperfect, layered, and always in flux.

Exhibitions

Walter Price has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Walter Price: Pearl Lines, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2024)
• Walter Price: Pearl Lines, Camden Art Centre, London (2021)
• Walter Price: We passed like ships in the night, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2019)
• Walter Price: Pearl Lines, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018)
• Walter Price, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2018)

Group Exhibitions

• MONUMENTS, The Brick and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2025)
• Citizens of Memory, The Perimeter, London (2021)
• Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019)
• 89plus: Americans 2017, LUMA Westbau, Zürich (2017)
• Fictions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017)

Critical Reception

Walter Price’s contemporary art practice has been discussed widely in Cultured Mag, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Financial Times.

Walter Price FAQs

Ocula | 2025