Camden Art Centre, London
May 2021
May 21–August 29, 2021
Following Walter Price’s residency at Camden Art Centre in early 2020, this exhibition Price presented core elements of this body of work alongside a group of new paintings and drawings made during lockdown in New York
As a title, Pearl Lines might allude to the assured, expressive marks with which he describes his glossary of figures, faces, tracks and traces—a language of lines and forms that operates almost like a kind of writing or graphology; but it speaks too to a narrative quality in the work—the lines or trails of thought, of stories, the yarns we spin. Drawing is a fundamental and central part of Price’s practice, of equal importance to painting, and the works on paper included here demonstrate a speed and directness of mark-making, as well as a restless sense of transformation, instability and change.
Many of the paintings were made in New York during the first COVID-19 lockdown, during which Price made the decision not to purchase more paints and materials instead using up whatever he had in the studio, drawing out and extending the dregs of his paints by mixing them with white. A reaction to his own exhaustion, as well as to the impulse to keep buying, keep consuming, to that relentless cycle of waste and excess, of over-production and over-consumption, it also introduced a more muted palette to Price’s work – of pale pastels, soft pinks, chalky whites.
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