Seth Price | Hell Has Everything

About

This is Price’s first show at the Chelsea gallery in six years, a period during which he produced a fashion show that debuted at dOCUMENTA (13); wrote a novel (Fuck Seth Price, which Kim Gordon described in The New York Times as “the best description of the art world ever”); launched Organic Software, a website anonymously created by Price featuring profiles of 4,500 art collectors; was the subject of The Seth Price Institute, a year-long research group and public event series hosted by CCA Wattis; and inaugurated career-spanning surveys at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Brandhorst, and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Price marks his return to Chelsea with a wave of new experiments, including mixed-media paintings, a large-scale video projection, and back-lit photographic works. 

Price’s new paintings employ printing, collage, paint, and photographic techniques. Some are based on photographs the artist took in New York’s streets and subways while others feature ambiguous objects constructed with 3D modeling software. All the works are manipulated by way of chemicals, pigmented polymer fluids, and powdered earth. 

The video-projection Social Synth is suspended from the ceiling. To create the work’s bizarre imagery, Price utilized a robotic camera that spent hours roving across a squid’s skin in order to yield over ten thousand photographs, which were then processed through software designed for map-making and 3D cinema. In this hybrid work, natural and artificial are intertwined, and a computer-generated light source becomes the protagonist in an uncanny organic landscape.

The video is not the first time Price has used this method; in 2015 he initiated a series of works in which details of human skin are photographed from models of various ages, genders, and races, and depicted as high resolution light boxes. A suite of these works were installed at MoMA PS1 over the summer of 2018. The light boxes on view at Petzel mark a departure: smaller in size and rendered in black and white, they depict areas of skin where the software was unable to synthesize its data into unified images, producing instead fractured, arbitrarily-determined compositions. These new works are also hand-embroidered with the phrase “New York City,” a marker of production reminiscent of Price’s inclusion of production date in his vacuum-forms and Calendar Paintings.

Taken as an ensemble, the works at Petzel suggest novelist Rachel Kushner’s characterization of Price’s work: “vision so accurate it becomes fiction.”