For The Art Show, 2019 Petzel is pleased to present a solo booth by Seth Price of new work featuring a light box, a mixed-media painting, and never-before-exhibited light tubes derived from the artist’s large-scale light box series, which were recently on view at MoMA PS1. Subdued lighting within the booth will create a focal point of light exuded from the tube sculptures with the light box and mixed-media painting framing the central assemblage.

Price is recognized for his interest in the exterior – packaging, clothing, the exoskeleton or skin – evident in the artist’s vacuum-forms, Mylar installations, fabric envelopes, and most recent light boxes. In this presentation at the ADAA, however, Price dives deeper in order to explore the body as a complex system through an intricate display of illuminated tubes in which details of human skin are stretched around tubular structures in varying sizes. “I have often worked with the body in one way or another,” says Price. “usually in a way that is distanced or abstracted.” 

Similar to Price’s light boxes, a series he began in 2015, the new light tubes continue the artist’s exploration of the human body via high-definition, microscopic images of human skin taken from hired models of various ages, races and genders. Each image is the product of a highly specialized camera that takes thousands of photographs within a confined space, from every conceivable angle. The vast amount of data produced by this process is algorithmically stitched together by a panorama program. Blending the real and the artificial, the images are then modified with 3D modeling software. The finished image is then printed on a proprietary synthetic fabric specialized to receive dye-sublimation transfers, and wrapped around a clear acrylic tube, which is then illuminated from within by thin spine of LED lights. With one side of the light tube capped, light streams out creating a flashlight effect. 

Speaking of the light boxes, Price says, “Even before I was thinking about skin, I was thinking about how to get a large format print at extremely high resolution. We are familiar with seeing huge prints on the side of buildings or buses, but there is almost no data there, it’s very low-res. Or you see super high-res images, but they are quite small.”

It is through these ethnological means that Seth Price achieves something that is completely artificial. Says Price, “The idea is to create this kind of uncanny image where you’ve got elements of a portrait and of a landscape.” 

Seth Price (American, b. 1973) is a multi-disciplinary artist who has gained international attention for his videos, sculptures, sound installations, and texts. Presenting a portrait of contemporary life, Price’s work addresses questions about appropriation, the distribution of cultural production, and the role and meaning of art. Novelist Rachel Kushner describes Seth Price’s work as a “vision so accurate it becomes fiction” in the way he probes and manipulates the flux of culture and the digital technologies of today.”

ADAA, The Art Show will be on view from February 28 through March 3 at The Park Avenue Armory, located at Park Avenue and 67th Street. For press inquires, please contact Ricky Lee at ricky@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.