Walter Price

David Zwirner is pleased to present Pearl Lines, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Walter Price. This is Price's first solo exhibition in Asia, and his second with the gallery since he joined David Zwirner in 2024. Pearl Lines includes new paintings and works on paper that feature characteristic forms from Price's visual domain.

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. His canvases and works on paper not only experiment freely with color, line, and space but also reveal 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.

The paintings and works on paper on view evoke fragmented and distorted memories, as alluded to in enigmatic titles like Hallucinatory Behavior 2, Day Jah Voo, and A new permanence imbued with memory (all 2025). Conjuring tensions between abstraction and figuration, Price's compositions feature disembodied heads, floating planes, umbrellas, and overstuffed couches among swaths of intense color and bold lines. He approaches painting as a mode of storytelling, suggesting fleeting moods and moments in formation. These compositions reveal and conceal the threads that constitute and warp narratives, hinting how they might inform present and future experiences, while leaving openings for interpretation by others. Throughout these works, Price refers obliquely to the work of numerous authors like American novelist Percival Everett while also taking inspiration from music, wordplay, and his own memories and personal encounters.

Price's signature blue palette is prominent across the works exhibited in Hong Kong. The artist mines the color's multitude of timeless and timely associations, invoking such quixotic historical connections in Western art as early cyanotypes, International Klein Blue, artists' blue periods, and the Virgin Mary's mantle. The color calls to mind a range of emotional responses like sadness and gloom, peace and calm, while also encompassing its applications in society and its appearance in nature. Price stretches and expands the bounds of blue as he layers, speckles, and scrapes the color onto his canvases in unorthodox applications, merging and abstracting its symbolism as well as its use in language.

Here, Price also incorporates various hues of green, a color that has been especially associated with Hong Kong. Green summons images of the region's luxuriant surrounds—forested mountain ranges and emerald coastal waters—as well as 'Hong Kong Tram Green,' created by Pantone in 2021 to memorialize the color of the city's distinctive transit vehicles. Dark green paint was left over from the Pacific War, and the additional supply was recycled and applied onto the exterior of the trams starting in the 1940s.

Walter Price (b. 1989) was born in Macon, Georgia, and served in the US Navy for four years before entering art school on the GI Bill. He received a BA from the Art Institute of Washington, Arlington, Virginia, in 2011 and an AA from Middle Georgia College, Cochran, in 2013.

The artist has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. In 2018, Price was the subject of a self-titled solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York. The same year, Walter Price: Pearl Lines was presented at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. In 2019, Walter Price: We passed like ships in the night was held at the Aspen Art Museum. The Camden Art Centre, London, presented Walter Price: Pearl Lines in 2021, which was accompanied by the first major monograph of the artist's work. In the fall of 2024, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, opened the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work to date.

The artist has also had solo exhibitions at the Modern Institute, Glasgow (2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022); Greene Naftali, New York (2020, 2022, and 2025); Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin (2022); 14a, Hamburg (2023); and Modern Art, London (2024) and Paris (2025).

Price has also been included in several notable group exhibitions, including Fictions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017); the 2019 Whitney Biennial; 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); and Black Melancholia, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022). Also in 2022, paintings by Price were included in the exhibition Toni Morrison's Black Book, curated by Hilton Als, at David Zwirner, New York. His work is on view through May 2026 in Monuments, an exhibition co-organized by The Brick and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and curated by Hamza Walker, Kara Walker, and Bennett Simpson.

The artist has been granted several residencies throughout his career at the Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York (2017); Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida (2018); Fürstenberg Contemporary, Donaueschingen, Germany (2019); and the Camden Art Centre, London (2020).

Work by Price is held in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Roberts Institute of Art, London; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.