Press Release: Price | Day

March 13 – May 31, 2020

Nathaniel Price & John Day
Preview online: https://youtu.be/Uw3M3M1p_c8
Click For Available Artwork

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to announce a two-person exhibition featuring artworks by John Day and Nathaniel Price. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, Day and Price use geometric forms to visualize eternity and mortality, balancing the swirling circulation of life with the lingering departure of it. The works on view approach a dark topic with the use of light, playfulness, and yet an eerie seriousness. The exhibition is a reminder that we are all in this together – yet very alone, a nod to the complexity of the human experience. John Day was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1932. Day tested and explored a number of different artistic practices, each a discrete permutation of the theoretical and practical variables that would allow him to ultimately “step out of the way,” freeing each of his viewers to a reception unsettling in its forceful solitude. Nathaniel Price was born in 1972 in New York City, and currently lives and works in Cambridge, MA. Price’s latest body of work is an attempt to visually describe the internal landscape of an individual through various renderings of the human form.

Nathaniel Price brings a range of perspective to his artistic approach, drawing from his experience as primary care doctor, a teacher at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as an artist. For several years, he’s been interested in barriers and constraints that can be either internal or external forms of resistance, and how these are fundamental elements of our complex lives. “Still (Counterpart)” is comprised of two life-sized, crouching figures, cast in semi-translucent resin, both of which are veiled in a shroud of steel wire that flow around and in front of the forms. The wire is simultaneously external and strangely a part of the bodies, acting to both constrain and also visually define the figures. One of the forms crouches atop a five-foot high section of concrete wall that acts to lift and separate the form from the viewer to a height that is quietly off balance, if not slightly dangerous.  The second figure is situated to the side of the wall, on the ground, separated by the steel, concrete and distance. This configuration can be thought of as an allegory of two different people in a potentially precarious situation.  For Price, however, the piece is an attempt to visually explain the complexities of the human condition, with its own frictions and uncertainties played out by positioning the similar forms acting as counterparts that render a silent, internal, drama of separation, distance, constraint, and melancholic yearning.

Price’s Pinky series is part of an exploration in materials that is meant to invite the viewer to question the work’s intention. The pieces are created with the use of a common material from his childhood growing up outside of NYC. Originally defective rubber cores of tennis balls, they were then repurposed and sold for street play in cities where they were fondly called “pinky” balls because of their hallmark color - a trait that also drew Price to include them in his artwork. For this series, he began collecting and assembling them in various shapes that had allusions to cellular reproduction, forming homunculus-like structures with associations to tissue formation. The resulting image: simultaneously curious to look at, playful, and, oddly, scientifically suspect.

John Day painted light, music, and the concept of pure refinement. A student of Josef Albers, by the 1970s his paintings began to simplify as he used his artistic practice to analyze and interpret death through geometric abstraction. What interested Day about death was its landscape and light; the light he painted was sky light that goes into infinity: not always beautiful, but also eerie, chilling, and cool. His paintings reach for an uninhabited netherworld yet never quite grasp it. As his style progressed, the works were reduced to two or three colors. Sometimes only a grey slab and a blue glow would refer to the echoing corridors where the past is lost, the present a prison, and the future a terrifying embrace. This pulsating, steely light became the subject of his paintings, derived through mathematical equations made up of cadences and chords. The music with which he surrounded himself was that of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Richard Strauss. To view his paintings is to experience a visual interpretation of sounds, an orchestra of tones. The carefully calculated richness of Day's paintings resides in their absences, exclusions, and restraint as much as in their application of paint to canvas. The vanishing point in his canvases becomes both an invitation and a threat.

John Day once said that his intentionally ambiguous paintings deal in opposites of inside and outside, high and low, real and imaginary, stable and quixotic, light and dark. He chose to deny visual realism in his paintings in order to convey what he believed to be a superior form of realism, one which the mind recognizes. Therefore, he abandoned realistic perspective in favor of a shifting perspective, in a symbolic landscape in which the voyager must remain constantly alert and prepared for surprises, and where the dangers are compounded by visual deception.[1]

Both John Day and Nathaniel Price banish the extraneous when approaching their art. When placed together, their work speaks an elegant language related to the human condition. Both artists invite systematic structure to their approach, defining their practice in routine and discipline. A final, tranquil resolution emerges – seeking a purity of light, balance, and emotional reinforcement.

John Day was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1932. Day sold his first painting at age fifteen, and at eighteen began his studies with Josef Albers in Yale University's Department of Design. He was a MacDowell Colony fellow in 1960-1962, and 1964. He exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other major institutions and art galleries. John Day's paintings are included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other notable public and corporate collections around the world. John Day died in 1982.

Nathaniel Price was born in New York City in 1972 and currently lives and works in Cambridge, MA. He received his BA from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and then went on to receive a medical degree in Ireland. Most recently, Price has shown at David J Sencer CDC Museum, Atlanta, GA and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA. He has attended multiple artist residencies including the M. H. De Young Museum Artist Residency in 2000 and the Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship Residency in 2009. Price has shown in multiple group shows including at Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA, Limm Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. As well as multiple solo shows at Toomey-Tourell Gallery, San Francisco, CA, LUX San Francisco, CA and M.H. De Young Museum Visiting Artist Gallery, San Francisco, CA. He is also a primary care doctor who teaches at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[1] Lunde, Karl. John Day, New York, NY, Tenth Avenue Editions, Inc., 1984.