Walter Price is unconventional. These days, Instagram is increasingly a place to catch a glimpse of artists and their work, but this American artist’s page doesn’t exist. Speaking to Price by Zoom in his New York studio, I discovered he had left social media in 2017. “Too much looking and not enough thinking,” he says. And one thing Price wants viewers of his work to do is to sit with and think about his paintings and drawings.
With his first major solo exhibition in the UK, Pearl Lines, about to open at Camden Art Centre in London, Price talks about the juxtaposition of styles and ideas in his work. He chose the title of his show because of its ambiguity in meaning but also to reference the value he places on drawing. It’s the same title as previous shows he’s had, because, he believes: “There's an effective magic to repetition. Like with a favourite song. I’d like to exhaust this title like a radio DJ does with a summer hit.”
It’s a natural tendency for Price to go against the grain in his work. “I’m always thinking about how to make people more comfortable with being uncomfortable. I use visual contradictions to symbolise ideas for myself but also [to allow] viewers to have their own story with these objects.” Blending elements of abstraction and figuration, he paints familiar motifs like couches, trees, fire, water, cars and bathtubs in unfamiliar contexts. Often reflecting on black identity in his own experience, and in the larger cultural imagination, he wrestles in his work with traditional conventions of the “right” way to make art.