David M Price - 'Horror Vacui'

About

Alma Enterprises is pleased to present the first London solo show of artist David M Price. The show will be the result of the artist's two month residency at Alma Enterprises where he has developed a new piece of work in response to Alma's manifesto. The manifesto challenges artists to produce an individual work that results from a lengthy engagement with the space usually in the form of a residency. Price's recent practice has been notable for his exquisite copperplate etchings depicting re-imagined historical landscapes and allegorical scenes. For his residency at Alma Enterprises he has developed a detailed wall drawing in ink on the entirety of the gallery walls. Price's concerns and influences seen in his etchings are reflected in this chosen technique that have echoes of the landscapes seen in paintings by Cranach, Altdorfer, Durer and Bellini. He is particularly influenced by their rendering of the imagined landscape, never drawn from source or photographed. As well as facilitating speed and economy the use of black pen and ink on a background of grey reinforces the falseness of the work whilst also alluding to the composition of the wall drawing. The design for Price's drawing is derived from the decorative patterns used in 18th Century wallpaper and furnishings which are made up of a large repeated 'frame' with the use of swags, bowers and floral decoration and set within each is a pastoral scene. Price's drawing mimics these designs, the swathes of foliage remain, as do the bucolic scenes, but these have been mutated and are now rendered as monstrous and perverse. There are now dead trees, puckered molehills and dripping stalactites. These contemporary pastoral vignettes are reminiscent of Fragonard and Watteau. The basis of Price's drawing is taken from his daily walk through woodland in Leytonstone. The Blakeian evocation of the sublime still being found in small pockets of London (seeing angels in Peckham Rye for example) is the underlying theme. The work suggest the possibility of sensual awe as well as weaving highly decorative Baroque forms with Gothic ecclesiastical subject matter to evoke a sense of fear and bewilderment from depictions of landscape. The mural becomes a mixture of Florentine and Venetian churches combined with an 18th century pattern, taking into account Romantic contemplation of the landscape, but fully aware of it's 21st century locus. David Price completed his MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2009