Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Walter Price
67
Floor 6
Born 1989 in Macon, GA
Lives in Brooklyn, NY
With elements of both figuration and abstraction, Walter Price’s paintings shift between everyday realities and invented worlds. Couches and cars float and merge into landscapes as space expands and contracts. Price’s subjects are drawn from his own experiences as well as familiar cultural symbols. The artist’s fluency with color, texture, and form gives physical weight to these liminal, dreamlike spaces. In making each new series of works, Price also sets limits. Sometimes he challenges himself to create a big impact on a small scale; in other paintings he reduces his palette to only a few colors. Mixing fragments of memory, recurring signs and symbols, and abstract figures engaged in unclear, ambiguous interactions, the paintings refuse the viewer’s efforts to find a fixed perspective or narrative.
The things that horse ourselves for uncertainty, 2018
Walter Price, The things that horse ourselves for uncertainty, 2018. Acrylic, clear gesso, and vinyl paint on canvas, 58 × 58 in. (147.3 × 147.3 cm). Image courtesy the artist; KARMA, New York; and Modern Institute, Glasgow
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Walter Price
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Walter Price: My name is Walter Price and I'm from Macon, Georgia. I'm twenty-nine years old.
Narrator: Price is showing a group of paintings here. Find the large, bright orange one that depicts a car.
Walter Price: I got an orange canvas and I want to work from that color. Usually when I'm starting, it's the base color, and I try to make everything dance around that, and I’ve got to have funky areas.
I'm more comfortable working with the color orange after hearing about color therapy and how it makes people happy to see orange. Then I think about how orange makes me feel, and what I think about. It's not quite happiness, but it's like—boldness.
I put the sign “think slowly” on the canvas for myself because . . .I speak fast. I'm a big daydreamer. I need that reminder to think slowly, just to breathe basically, to relax in a city that is not relaxing.
I like things to be welcoming, but then also kind of make you wonder about the seriousness of it. Some of the work may look cartoony to some or whatever it may be, but then I want this underlying seriousness to make you question: is that a car wreck, is that this.
Maybe it is a lot to do with where I've come from, and how happy I am to be here in a way. Maybe it's a painting about death, maybe it’s about getting second chances in life, but to be honest, I'm not quite sure.