Walter Price: Pearl Lines

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 display 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 significance to the city and its environs. Across the 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 many of these works–What will come of what I'm doing today? (2024), Off the divide (2024), and others—warm reds contrast sharply with the prominent blue palette featured. Price mines the color’s multitude of timeless and timely associations, invoking such unusual 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.

Concurrent with his debut at David Zwirner Los Angeles, Price’s most comprehensive museum exhibition to date is now on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Also named Pearl Lines, the exhibition includes more than twenty paintings organized around recurring themes that the artist has explored in recent years, including many of the motifs in his Los Angeles exhibition.

Furthering his ongoing exploration of color, Price stretches and expands the bounds of blue with this newest body of work. 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.”

In Pearl Lines at David Zwirner Los Angeles, 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 turbulent car accident. A splash of red-orange paint overwhelms a canvas, recalling sunsets on the Pacific Ocean as seen from the freeway.