Seth Price: No Technique

Since the early 2000s, artist Seth Price has produced a diverse body of work that interrogates contemporary visual culture. Employing both traditional art media and materials often used in industrial production, Price explores the nature of authorship, identity, and our shifting relationship to images in an increasingly digital and globalized world.

The AAM’s exhibition highlights two painting series from Price’s expansive oeuvre: his vacuum formed Knot Paintings, begun in 2009—including several important polystyrene reliefs that have never before been exhibited in the United States—and the more recent Social Space series, which portrays printed images of computer-modeled objects and employ poured resins and hand-applied polymer compounds.

Industrial plastics carry a host of cultural associations, including as a symbol of the modernist belief in technological progress and as an embodiment of the modes of production, distribution, and proliferation of objects and information. By combining synthetic materials and industrial processes with seemingly organic forms and gestures, Price collapses the distinction between the hand-made and the mass-produced, raising important questions about creativity and consumer culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century.