Walter Price “Pearl Lines” at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Walter Price has spent a decade refining what Peter Schjeldahl once called his “style-defying style,” threading abstraction with an evocative realism that hovers on the brink of legibility. His third solo exhibition at Greene Naftali arrays two distinct bodies of work across the ground- and eighth-floor spaces, featuring new paintings and works on paper that comprise a hybrid genre all his own. Recurring symbols scratch at a personal cosmology but don’t reduce to tidy narratives, keeping the ties that bind formalism to identity or politics stirringly unhinged. A phalanx of umbrellas provides single-occupancy shelters, roving and precarious; fields of stamped or stenciled stars deconstruct the flag, dispersing its authority. Mental landscapes studded with charged objects give way to frieze-like scenes of milling crowds, briskly sketched but with a satirist’s eye for the telling detail.

Price’s latest work continues to “operate color as a vehicle of surprise,” as Darby English has noted—though here the artist’s signature polychrome palette gravitates toward an ocean blue. At times, that shade also douses the gallery’s surrounding architecture, tapping affective wells beyond the ascension or melancholy blue is often said to conjure. Throughout, Price gives equal weight to what is given and what is withheld, tempering the abundance of each teeming surface with subtler moves of obscuring or deflection. Masked figures invoke the art-historical tradition of the clown or fool as an archetype of concealment; framed artworks are painted over and words half-effaced, urging attention to flex and heighten.

“Everything starts with a line,” Price has said, describing drawing as foundational to his practice, and here its affinities to painting reach a new degree of symbiosis. A vibrant series on canvas titled Drawing, for instance, bounds each central figure with a swift dashed line—a vector of energy that courses through Price’s work, stringing the eye along its path. Other ingenious modes of paint application stretch the possibilities of the graphic mark: whether troweled in neat striations or incised with the blunt end of a brush; lines that meander in bright acrylic or accrete in glints of chrome. Like pulses in a forcefield, Price’s drawn elements lend his paintings their structure and kinetic hold, and Pearl Lines advances his fundamental pursuit of what each medium can give to the other.

at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
until April 19, 2025