Chantal Crousel

Seth Price

12 Mar - 30 Apr 2011

© Seth Price
Spago, 2011
UV cured inkjet and enamel on PETG vacuum-formed over rope / Encre figée par UV et émail sur plaque de plastique PETG thermoformée, corde 114,3 x 118,1 cm
SETH PRICE
Miam !
12 March - 30 April, 2011

The Chantal Crousel gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition by Seth Price, his first in France.
Most of the works in the exhibition started with a small, quick sketch by the artist, which he scanned, enlarged, digitally manipulated, and printed on sheets of plastic. The plastic was then vacuum-formed over randomly-placed ropes and painted with acrylic, enamel and polyurethane. Price has worked with both ropes and vacuum-formed plastic for several years, but this is the first time he has expanded these techniques into the realm of representational drawing and painting. As is often the case with Price’s work a coherent and clear position is avoided, and the meanings here of satirical caricature, abstraction, or even painting itself, are unstable or unresolved.
Price also exhibits a short story, written and narrated by the artist, as an audio piece with French subtitles projected nearby. A transcript of the story is available at the gallery.

Michael Newman has written* :

“ In the way that he explores different articulations across various mediums between source, object, and redistribution, Price has developed in an exemplary manner the experience of an artist born in 1973, and based in New York. He and his peers are working under unprecedented conditions, including the digitalization of image and sound, the Internet as both source and network of distribution, and a global art world in which information circulates very fast. Price’s multifarious practice—which to date includes video and video installation, music, wall works using laminate, vacuum-formed plastic, and plastic- covered metal panels which could be considered somewhere between sculpture and painting, drawing, writing, and performance—contains reference to both popular culture and the art of the not-so-distant past, in particular the period from the 1960s to the 1980s spanning Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art.
Price, together with other artists of his generation, has moved the place of art from being that of figure on ground (as it still is in the period of critique, whether autonomous figure on mass-culture ground in Adorno, or making the institutional ground into a figure in Buchloh’s “institutional critique”), to occupying the edge between figure and ground, flickering between the two. That this dance of figure and ground is, in so many of Price’s “silhouette works,” performed by hands, serves to draw our attention, again, to the relation between the found and the made, between the tangible and the immaterial, and between the virtual and the actual.”

*in Newman, Michel. “Seth Price Operations”, Price, Seth, Kunsthalle Zürich, JRP Ringier, 2010.
 

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