Alex Price’s paintings explore the intersection of representation and materiality, articulating a space in which image, substance, and surface are held in dynamic tension.
Working wet-on-wet, Price engages the intrinsic properties of paint, privileging its capacity for immediacy, fluidity, and unpredictability. Mark-making shifts between legibility and abstraction, with some gestures alluding to recognisable forms, while others interrupt and destabilise the visual plane. As figuration collapses into the material logic of the medium, Price’s work foregrounds the conditions of perception, interrogating the ways in which meaning is both constructed and disrupted through visual, physical, and psychological experience.
In Price’s most recent body of work, the natural world serves as a vehicle to explore the limitless possibilities of painted line and gesture. Unruly branches curl in on themselves, weeds droop and dissolve, and once-familiar shapes begin to wobble out of recognition. Throughout these paintings, Price draws on observation, memory, and imagination to produce bold biomorphic forms that become increasingly distorted through the peculiar behaviour of the medium itself.
Rather than capturing nature as it is, Price focuses on how to interpret it—how understanding can be made, unmade, and remade again through the act of looking and painting. These are not traditional botanical studies; they are visual experiments: strangely awkward, and slightly feral. They reflect a twisted version of the natural world that subtly evokes the ecological uncertainties of today.
