For his AAM exhibition We passed like ships in the night, New York–based artist Walter Price presents a selection of seven paintings created during his time as an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island. The small, sandy island on the western coast of Florida was artist Robert Rauschenberg’s home for over thirty-five years, and he described the landscape as possessing “a magic that was unexplainable in its power.” Embracing Captiva as a site for the creation of new work, Price painted a series of intimately scaled works that blend abstraction and representation. From washes of color evoking both sea and sky, the wavering horizon line, or the breeze blowing through a palm tree, Price’s paintings render an imagined landscape within the concrete space of the physical world. We passed like ships in the night is a rumination on a specific place, Captiva, as well as a poetic reminder of how we use symbols and memory to construct our collective cultural landscape.

Walter Price (b. 1989 Macon, GA) lives and works in New York. He received his BA from the Art Institute of Washington in Arlington, VA. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at MoMA P.S.1, New York; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (both 2018); and LUMA Foundation, Zürich (2017). Recent group exhibitions have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); MOCA Cleveland (2018); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2017).