Walter Price: Pearl Lines

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.

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.

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. They 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.

It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at (2025) comes from a body of work in which the paintings’ titles allude to rain or inclement weather—further pointing to difficult moments in life that are only recognized after they have passed. In the present composition, open umbrellas and faces in profiles are depicted across the support. The faces are all portrayed in profile, their distinctive noses becoming abstracted shapes among the multicolored panels of the umbrellas. While the title references hardship and distress, it likewise identifies the resilience of humankind as well as the ability to realize and improve flaws and navigate complicated scenarios.

Working assuredly and intuitively, Price creates works whose gestures and surfaces thrum with kinetic energy. In the words of curator Ashley James, "For all its perceived mysticism, Price's funky 'push-and-pull' process is still an informed and prepared one. No small degree of readiness is required to make fluid and good decisions in the moment, and in an unforgiving medium at that. For this reason, drawing is key for Price—both as a model for a painting practice that can remain loose and guided, and as the very literal practice that allows Price to confidently tackle the infinitely mutable medium.

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 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.

Pearl Lines at David Zwirner Hong Kong is Price’s first solo exhibition in Asia, and his second with the gallery since he joined David Zwirner in 2024. Price’s work is also included in the 2025–2026 group exhibition MONUMENTS, co-organized and co-presented by The Brick and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and curated by Hamza Walker, Kara Walker, and Bennett Simpson.