Since 2016, Walter Price has titled most of his solo exhibitions “Pearl Lines.” The phrase constitutes an image in its own right, establishing an overarching semantic space in which Price embeds his paintings and drawings. A purposely polysemic image, it suggests aspects of quiet grandeur and decorative elegance, but also an idea of linear concatenation and continuity. The reiteration of the words gives them an incantatory dimension, like a spell: “There’s an effective magic to repetition,” as Price said in an interview in 2021, “like with a favourite song. I’d like to exhaust this title like a radio DJ does with a summer hit.” In keeping with that proposition, he brings the incantatory charm of repetition to bear in the interrelations between individual works, which he often unfurls as sequences of deliberate similarities and subtle differences.
A comprehensive color scheme usually underlies Price’s installations, and in this instance, too, he tuned the showroom to a single basic tone, with the gallery walls all painted a warm orange muted down to an ever so slightly less welcoming hue reminiscent of red lead. Prescribing a very specific blend of paints for an exhibition is standard practice for Price; it sets the atmospheric keynote and interacts with the paintings in dynamic ways. In this environment, Price presented seven small-format paintings, all created in 2023 and executed in acrylic, gesso, India ink, and gouache on wood, sometimes enhanced by collage elements. Their palette consisted almost entirely of black, red, and a golden yellow (Shed identity to see reality and Repressed memories added blue, green, and white). The unusual and pointedly emphasized combination of colors hinted at a representational and contextual aspect: Price had staged the colors of the German flag—but was it in tribute to or as an ironic dig at the country in which the exhibition was being held? In painterly terms, the gesture was a distinctly daring one: The colors of national flags, including Germany’s, typically contrast with one another, and in painting, such tones can easily clash.