Walter Price
Pearl Lines
David Zwirner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
November 16, 2024—February 1, 2025
Pearl Lines by is David Zwirner gallery’s first exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Walter Price (b. 1989) since the announcement of his representation in 2024. Marking Price’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Pearl Lines includes paintings from a new body of work that features recurring motifs from his vibrant paintings and drawings.
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.