Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein Walter Price: It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at, 2024

Pearl Lines, at Greene Naftali, is Walter Price’s fourteenth exhibition with that title. The artist—born in Macon, Georgia, in 1989 and now based in Brooklyn—believes in what he has called the “effective magic” of repetition. “I’d like to exhaust this title,” he has said, “like a radio DJ does with a summer hit.” Magic and exhaustion might seem incompatible, but Price has a way of reconciling them. He repeats a selection of techniques and a personal lexicon of phrases and images—umbrellas, armchairs, cryptic motivational slogans—from work to work, show to show, with great volume (there are some fifty pieces, across two floors, in this iteration of Pearl Lines). Seen often enough, the images give way to unexpected illusions, as if pulled from a hat. (Hats, too, are a Price motif.)

Price learned the value of repetition, he says, from military drill. He enrolled in the navy after high school, in large part to fund his subsequent art education. In Macon, a city then struggling through the decline of its manufacturing industries, he had drawn cartoons and sought guidance through a correspondence course from the (now defunct) Art Instruction Schools. In the navy he drew for lack of painting supplies; he also grew out a high-top fade, cutting a figure like the one portrayed, in dotted outline, in enchanted darkness (2025), a small painting in Greene Naftali’s front room. 

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Júlia Standovár Walter Price: enchanted darkness, 2025

In 2011 Price matriculated at the (now defunct) Art Institute of Washington and at Middle Georgia College, now Middle Georgia State University. In some ways his trajectory echoes those of the midcentury artists, such as Ed Clark and Robert Rauschenberg, who received scholarships via the GI Bill. To the art critic Ben Davis, the GI Bill “proves that one of the best policies for supporting art might actually just be education and the means to live, universally granted.” But after the bill expired, in 1956, the later federal programs to support military veterans proved to be less comprehensive.  Between long-dwindling public funding and the financialization of education, paths like Price’s grow narrower all the time. Veterans cannot attend art school if all the art schools shut down.

Still, Price found critical and commercial success early on, staging several solo exhibitions in the US and Europe before he was thirty and ever-larger presentations since, including a 2024 show, also called Pearl Lines, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Over the years he has tried out different media, from glitter to sculpture, and adapted his earlier work—drawings, mostly—to a larger scale. His basic sensibility, his cartoony icons, and his clashing colors have all remained consistent, but at Greene Naftali he puts them to the test, studiously assessing his methods and materials.

Reprogramming! (2024), the first painting in the first floor’s central room, serves as an overture for the newer work. It features a mess of symbols that we will see again in various forms, here mostly described by Price’s permeable dotted line: the armchair, the flat-top figure, a fleet of toes, and self-help exhortations, including a doubled refrain to “SAVE YOURSELF.” He paints the words on several pieces, each time rendering only the top halves of the letters such that they appear to be drowning, sinking into the paint. 

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: Reprogramming!, 2024

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: Somewhere on pionono, 2023

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: Allow the consequences to unfold as they will, 2023

Price’s iconography and color—deep and light blues, greens, and oranges applied chaotically to every side of the panel—produce a kind of information overload. The next painting, Somewhere on pionono (2023), further obscures the signals. Scattered with psychedelic hues, it reveals a figure in profile, an armchair, and, at center, a dotted description of another chair. Or maybe toes. Georges Bataille criticized “man’s secret horror of his foot.” Price chimes in with a message on the painting’s left edge: “DONT BE AFRAid.”

Allow the consequences to unfold as they will (2023), another small panel, shows a more intact armchair. Like the others, it faces outward, a seat from which the painting views you as you view it. Price includes a deconstructed US flag—stars at bottom-left, stripes right of center—and a cascading trio of men: one a partial outline; the next glowing in green with thick, red lips; the last a shadow, wearing a big hat. They are, each in their own way, menacing but invisible, or at least insubstantial. So are the silhouetted profile on the next painting and the ghostly, scribbled figures floating against a dark background on the one after that. Titled Devils in disguise (2023), it features streaks of green-screen green, and its sides are coated in a quasi–Yves Klein Blue.

This blue recurs across Pearl Lines. Something like it even covers the walls and carpet of the gallery’s back rooms, which are packed with largely blue paintings, all with the same title: It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at. In Devils in Disguise the blue and green recall the vibrant placeholder backgrounds used in chroma-keying for video production. Price is not the only contemporary artist to put those colors to pointed effect: in her recent videos and installations, Sondra Perry uses so-called Chroma Key Blue both to create strange composite images—like the hybrid video game–real-life visuals of IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 (2017)—and to address the asymmetrical ways that visual technologies display dark versus light skin. Chroma screens, she suggests, are sites of not just visualization but invisibility, ways to render figures anew but also render them away. Price, not unlike Perry, takes advantage of color’s ability to serve as both metaphor and technique. Some of the characters in Devils in Disguise—dark, partial, and set against a near-black backdrop superimposed, it seems, on the blue—flit in and out of focus depending on where you stand, an effect that throws their stability into question.

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein Walter Price: Devils in Disguise, 2023

The blue rooms showcase a sprawling collection of painterly approaches. Price makes use of stencils and glitter, built-up impasto and recessive sgraffito, cartoonish representation and washy abstraction. The primary motif here is the umbrella, which hovers over different types of quasi-invisible men: figures who disappear into the background or into one another as a huddled, anonymized mass. One painting’s central figure wears a hat like the invisible man’s in the 1933 film, his silhouette etched into the blue paint and partially reinforced with white. Within this figure’s body Price sketches another one, articulated by light blue lines. It intimates both a time lapse and a doubled consciousness—the inscription of the people into their environment.

A similar doubling effect recurs in the gallery’s central room, in a line of small panels that show masked figures: a clown, for example, and a Batman with collaged-on eyes. On the side of one panel, Price paints the words “AN INVISIBLE REFERENCE.” The top says “KEEP PUMP FAKING!” Nearby is, one suspects, another allusion to basketball: “GM ATL vs Boston SATURDAY APRIL”—which, I would guess, refers to Game 1 of a 2023 NBA playoff series in which the Boston Celtics beat Price’s home-state Hawks.1

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at, 2024

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at, 2024

Three larger pieces, among the show’s best, allude to a different sport: chess. “I play a lot of chess, but I’m not a good chess player,” Price told Michelle Grabner in 2024. He likes to make mistakes. Here he paints chess as a series of coded moves, plotted in faint lines on panels like The mind is like a parachute (2025): “E4 C6 F3” and so on.2 He portrays some chess pieces as well, pawns and a knight—most of them dotted, immaterial. Mingling with armchairs, they take on the vivid matrices of color underneath them.

In 2023 Price’s contemporary Hamishi Farah showed a suite of paintings of gleaming black chess pieces, depicted against the chessboard’s quasi-Albertian grid. The artist Hannah Black observed that Farah’s “anti-representational representation” confronted the racialized dynamics that propel the art world and its expectations of Black artists: “The simplicity of the gesture—we face the black pieces as the white side—contains a complicated wager about representation and play.” Price’s pawns, by contrast, are neither black nor white; the few that are not transparent are painted deep blue.

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein Walter Price: The mind is like a parachute, 2025

Using “color palettes that are both congruent and incongruent,” Price told Grabner, is, among other things, “a way to dance around the politics, being a Black artist…. I feel like color is also a device that I use to work with and against how people read my paintings based on my biography. But mostly I approach color as play.” In The mind is like a parachute and elsewhere, he attends to how figures and colors move and yet also how their motion is constricted, tethered to fixed coordinates. Chess involves play, but as Price has been quick to point out, if in a different register than Farah and Black, it also means war. In 2022 he produced a painting with a dark purple pawn hovering near a partly effaced American flag; he called it Every play is a battle.

Pearl Lines continues on the eighth floor of Greene Naftali with a suite of paintings and drawings, limited in number but no less strange. When the elevator doors open, a long hallway directs the viewer to two paintings that, from a distance, look rather different than the ones downstairs. They are large and vertically oriented (the first floor privileges horizontal formats). Most of them trade Price’s signature all-over compositions for scenes with a central figure or a small group atop a bright, solid-color backdrop. He trades substrates, too—panel for canvas—and meandering titles for ones that are programmatic, if somewhat misleading. In the painting Drawing 4 (2023) another pointy-eared Batman, this one with multiplying facial features, sits in a familiar armchair, wearing starred pants and striped socks, against a plane of baby blue, flat but marked with brushstrokes. 

The effect is overwhelming, but for a new reason: after seeing the intense tonal clashes on the first floor, it is a shock to encounter so much unmodulated color. “A square centimeter of blue,” as Henri Matisse observed, “is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue.” Or red, as in Drawing 6 (2023), where Price redeploys—and enlarges—the clown from downstairs. Clowns appear in several of the drawings on this floor and in the painting Drawing 2 (2023), where one surveils two light-skinned figures who seem distressed. One of them looks to be wearing a Supreme hat.

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: Drawing 6, 2023

Walter Price/Greene Naftali/Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein

Walter Price: Drawing 2, 2023

Price’s “drawings,” populated with clowns and pseudo-clowns and set against monochromatic voids, have a negative charge; in this, and in their rough, even ugly style, they evoke artists from the early Otto Dix to Palmer Hayden to Price’s contemporary Zac Segbedzi—painters known for wielding crude figuration to expose the crudeness of an outwardly respectable middle class. But Price turns his negativity on the medium of painting itself, which he both essentializes—flattening his figures right up against the ground of his compositions—and playfully devalues. Here the dotted lines that circumscribe his characters almost tempt you to cut them out. They look like stickers from a coin-operated vending machine or figures in a meme—a cultural form that relies on something like the repetition, cutting, and linguistic fragmentation that populate Pearl Lines.

Painting has weathered accusations of exhaustion since at least the turn of the twentieth century; as James A. Snead put it in 1981, in a great essay on repetition as a cultural technique, “men have by now had to make peace with the idea that the world is not inexhaustible in its manifold combinations.” If Price’s repeated, cut-up iconography is a way of calling attention to that state of exhaustion, over time it also comes to seem like a way of playing within, or fighting against, the medium’s affordances and constraints. Cuts and repetitions, Snead argued, help an artwork “confront accident and rupture not by covering them over but by making room for them inside the system itself.” Price makes room, even supplies armchairs, inviting the viewer to get cozy. Or not. “I’m always thinking,” he has said, “about how to make people more comfortable with being uncomfortable.” It is an idealistic position, perhaps, but there’s room in the art world for ideals.