Sadie Coles: I’m putting together the press text. Tell me about the processes you have engaged to make the works for Davies Street.
Seth Price: You could just say the works are a combination of gestural and machine processes.
Is there a title for the show?
Maybe just use my name.
SETH PRICE it is. Digital tools collide with gestural painting in these paintings. Is the collision the point?
It’s what allows me to get into the paintings. There’s a friction that comes when you join the quickness and intuition of the body, the gesture of a body in space and time, and the slowness of processing, the deliberateness, the alien, abstract quality, the extreme control.
You have written, ‘When the painting starts to feel like a problem I photograph it and put the photo in a 3D cinema program, where I add simple virtual objects like planes, tubes, hemispheres, and algorithmic patterns.’ How would you identify a ‘problem’ in a painting? And do you know when you have solved it?
I’m trying to paint without thinking about things like composition and harmony, and still wind up with what I feel is a cool painting. That’s my only goal, cool paintings. Ideally, I make something by hand that has a lot of energy but a total lack of resolution and balance, something embarrassing that I wouldn’t want to show. Then I use the machine to solve the problem. So, with these pieces, the work of harmony and beauty happens not only in the material world, or the art historical world of gestural composition, or as a body responding to movement and touch, but in an inhuman place.
This quote of yours discussing identity and the human condition: ‘Art shows us how to mix inside and outside, self and other, private and public, material and immaterial. Art reveals our nonhuman part’. Do you mean our machine learning part? Or the exact opposite of that. Our potential for chaos?
Art promises to put us in touch with everything that’s not human, everything outside of us. That’s what we’re attracted to. I don’t mean just the technical world, but also the natural world, or the spirit world.
In your earlier paintings Thought Comes From The Body (2022) and Thought Comes From the Body II (2022-3) you feature a warped fish-eye view of a studio space, a motif which reappears in the works for this show, but has expanded to include urban sites, architectural details and rural skies. How do you determine the subject of these preservations or ‘peephole’ glimpses?
I bring the paintings into software, into a virtual studio, where I light them with photographs of real-world locations. When you place a reflective ball on the painting, it mirrors that location. Some of the works in this show are lit by places in London. I laid one painting on its back on the plaza at Canary Wharf. But I usually pick a location because of the light: the time of day, the position of the sun, whether it’s overcast or not. I put one painting in the show in the middle of a Cotswolds road at night, lit by the moon, and the shadows in the painting are very soft, with a lot of brown.
What music fits these paintings? They feel like they might have a soundtrack.
Something alien and drifty. Though I walked into the studio the other day and some punishing techno was playing, and I felt like I could suddenly understand something.
Seth Price (b. 1973, East Jerusalem) has exhibited internationally with major exhibitions including Art Is Not Human, Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London (2022); No Technique, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2019); Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad, MoMA PS1, New York (2018); Seth Price Circa 1981, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2017); Seth Price – Social Synthetic, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017, touring to Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 2017); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, (2012); MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna (2009); Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich (2009); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009); and Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2007, with Kelley Walker). Group exhibitions include those at Kode, Bergen (2024); National Gallery of Ancient Art, Rome (2024); Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2024); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2021); Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens (2021); de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2020); Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2020); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2019 and 2020); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019 and 2020); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2019); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Estancia FEMSA / Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2019); Shanghai Biennale (2018); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018). His work is held in various prestigious public collections internationally including Astrup Fearnly Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others.