David Zwirner, the mega-gallery with spaces in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, has added one more artist to its roster before it opens a new Los Angeles outpost later this month. Rising painter Walter Price will present a new work in “David Zwirner: 30 Years,” a group show featuring the gallery’s entire roster that will inaugurate the LA location. His first solo show with the gallery is slated for November in LA.
Price is best-known for his vibrant palette which he assiduously applies to both canvas and wood panel, as he modulates between abstraction and figuration to dazzling effect. The works often have a dreamlike quality to them, drawing from the Brooklyn-based artist’s own memories and other moments of collective history.
The majority of his solo exhibitions have all been titled “Pearl Lines,” which a 2021 exhibition description explained as possibly alluding “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.”
Born in 1989, Price served in the US Navy for four years and pursued his art school education on the GI Bill. He will be the subject of a major survey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this fall. He has also had solo institutional shows at MoMA PS1 (2018), the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (2018), the Aspen Art Museum (2019), and the Camden Art Centre in London (2021).
He has also been included in major group shows like the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 Front International Triennial, “Fictions” at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2017), and “Black Melancholia” at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Upstate New York (2022).
Walter Price, Races on the sea, 2020–21.
©Walter Price/Courtesy the artist
Price, who will continue to be represented by Greene Naftali in New York, has shown with Zwirner once before, when critic Hilton Als included two works by Price in the 2022 exhibition “Toni Morrison’s Black Book” in New York, which also featured artists like Garrett Bradley, Beverly Buchanan, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Martin Puryear, and Bob Thompson, among others.
Of Price’s inclusion in that exhibition, gallery founder David Zwirner said in a statement, “I was immediately struck by Price’s utterly assured and complex compositions. His work, which exudes mystery, playfulness, and a careful attention to process and color, sets him apart among the emerging painters of his generation. I am thrilled to be working with him, and am very much looking forward to seeing his painting in conversation with work by other gallery artists at our anniversary exhibition in Los Angeles later this month.”
