WALTER PRICE

As much as Price’s canvases revel in vivid color, solo exhibitions at venues such as MoMA PS1 or the Aspen Art Museum have also demonstrated his abiding commitment to line, to draftsmanship. A painting like A breeze filled with determination wafted towards us (2018) is studded with sparse symbols suggestive of both personal and cultural experiences—a runner, a palm tree, a Georgia peach—their identities recognizable yet, as curator Ashley James suggests, “never fully comprehended.” Drawing is foundational to Price’s practice, an independent endeavor in which the artist plays even further with detail, his agile strokes of pencil and pastel contributing to a typology of figures and scenes both diverse and coherent.

Continuing in the tradition of artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Henry Taylor, Price creates imagery that is figurative and abstract, individual and collective. Racial and ideological binaries are overturned as well, decoupled from their mainstream signifiers; for English, Price moves toward “claiming and combining cultural differences an otherwise inclined artist would forfeit and separate.” Transgressing bounded ideas of representation, Price’s combinatory logic instead challenges the strictures of visual communication and cultural consciousness, the relationship between what we see and what we know. In the end, Price aims for something more visceral: art that, in his words, ”feels funky.”

Courtesy Greene Naftali