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Alex Price’s small-scale paintings on linen combine colour, gesture and texture to create compositions that complicate the relationship between seeing and understanding. Through smears, swipes and smudges, he transforms reference materials into obscure approximations that highlight the complexities of perception, whilst calling attention to the curiousness of paintings as physical things.

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Recent Paintings

Alex Price’s paintings suggest rather than explain. From a distance, the small-scale canvases hint at familiar forms—objects, figures, landscapes in passing. Up close, however, they disintegrate into passages of colour and gesture, insisting on their own physicality, refusing to be reduced to mere image. Like little poems, the works invite interpretation, whilst stubbornly withholding their meaning.

Price’s practice centres around this fragile relationship between seeing and understanding. Reflecting on the ways we view, inhabit and experience the world, he conjures moments at the edges of perception and comprehension, where the everyday slips into obscurity and evades straightforward recognition.

Drawing from a diverse array of sources—including paintings, photographs, and film stills—Price mines historical and contemporary visual culture, dismantling and distorting references to create new, ambiguous approximations. In his work, shapes and structures merge, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, to evoke a world that seems both fragmented and fleeting.

Price’s approach is indebted to the materiality of the paint. Mixing his medium with ground pumice, he combines dense brushstrokes with smears, swipes and smudges to not only construct an image, but also create texture that accentuates the physical surface of the canvas. As layers accumulate they produce a matte crust, preserving traces of this process as he searches for the precise marks to resolve each composition.

These are works that are both influenced by and rooted in the material world. Price’s creations speak to the enigma of human perception, whilst highlighting the curiousness of paintings as physical things. In doing so, Price’s work reexamines the ontologies of painting, questioning the inherent dynamics at play between image, surface and process.