Clare Price: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”

About

Clare’s paintings investigate the sensuousness of making, the interaction with the body in the studio and the palpable “stuff” of paint, which freezes the hidden performance – traces and residues of moments are captured like photographic exposures. In the paintings voluptuous gestural elements are set against translucent geometric planes. These shapes, drawn from modernist forms and digital tools, “pin” spilled vistas creating ambiguous spaces. Clare uses colours that range from a muted palette of wet stains that refer to the body, to smears of neon that talk of the digital and rave. Visceral oil paint is used in hues that draw from classical painting and abstract expressionism; the colours are bodily, fragile and at times intense and darkly lush.

Replicating the hidden performance of the studio, Clare will spend two days working with hair models, drawing on the palette of her paintings to create one-off colour creations at DKUK, using L’Oreal’s Colourful Hair range of dyes. As in the creation of her paintings, this performance will only exist through the traces that it leaves behind; the hair colour on the models, and through photographic documentation that extends the exhibition online, produced in collaboration with photographer Benjamin Whitley. These images will function in symbiosis with the works at DKUK and reach further into Clare’s own investigations into performance and photography in relation to her practice.