Seth Price

MAMbo – Museo d'Arte Moderna of Bologna has the pleasure of presenting the first solo exhibition of Seth Price in an Italian museum.

Prices's artistic research is characterised by a multidisciplinary approach, which includes painting, sculpture, photography, sounds, video, and writing. Investigating the role played by the distribution/dissemination in redefining the creative and intellectual practices, Price adopts and reconfigures strategies ranging from Conceptual Art to Appropriationism to explore the multiple connections and the potential interpretations arising from the work itself, its references or the materials used to produce it.

For the first time the show at MAMbo joins together the complete series of Calendar Paintings (2003-2004), displayed in parts at both Kölnischer Kunstverein of Cologne in 2008 and at Reena Spaulings Gallery of New York in 2009, as well as in earlier incarnations in group shows in 2004. The inkjet-on canvas works contain advertisement images, computer graphics, and reproductions of paintings made between the two World Wars by American painters less known by the general public. Each painting bears its original date of production. In Bologna a selection of vacuum-formed sculptures, in which rope knots are captured in painted and printed plastic through the vacuum-forming packaging process, will be also on view, as well as two videos: Redistribution (2007 - ongoing) and Köln Waves/Blues (2006/2008). Redistribution, begun in 2007 and conceived as a never-finished, constantly updated work, takes up a Guggenheim "artist's talk" delivered by Price only to pull it apart, reassemble it and graft new material to it, resulting in an open-form hybrid. For Köln Waves/Blues, Price purchased a 6-second video loop from a company that makes "empty" background images for corporate use, then added color effects and looped it, yielding a hypnotic, emptied-out work that looks back to structuralist and early film experiments even as it presents an image of degraded and détourned digital junk, threatening at each instant to collapse.

In concomitance with the exhibition of Seth Price at MAMbo a new artist's book published by MAMbo will be available.

Seth Price was born in East Jerusalem in 1973. He lives and works in New York.

Seth Price
2009
Kuratoren: Gianfranco Maraniello, Andrea Viliani