Is this Colorado’s most important living painter?

Harmonious Dissonance is the kind of career retrospective that painter Bruce Price has long deserved but never quite received until now It s hard to say why it took so long Price has been painting for five decades and is a well-known and popular figure in the regional art landscape He taught for several years at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and several other local artists think of him as a mentor When people talk about the the majority essential living painters in Colorado they frequently mention Bruce Price That is no small thing Price is what you might call an artist s artist His work is rooted in th-century modernism particularly geometric abstraction but for him that is just a starting point While his painting honors the exactness of that style with its sharp lines and strict patterns he has never been beholden to its rules Instead he has rewritten them on his own imaginative terms Bruce Price s Manifold from Ray Mark Rinaldi Special to The Denver Post More than that Price has put in the work That is to say he did what excellence requires He painted relentlessly obsessively and intellectually all the while experimenting with color form material dimension perspective He made his progress one small step at a time with a logic that drove it but also an excitement that has kept it surprising And he wrapped it up in final products that are easy to like even when they are hard to understand a trait I would also apply to the abstractionists who preceded him at the highest levels here such as Dale Chisman who died in and Clark Richert who died in Both were influential on canvas and in the public like Price and both held that unofficial title of Colorado s largest part crucial living painter during their lifetimes It has been laborious to size up Price in a way that would place him or not in that geographic pantheon until this moment because Price has not as far as I know ever had his work organized and exhibited in such a comprehensive and masses way There was a solo show at the Denver Art Museum in though it was modest and focused narrowly on then-recent works on paper and flew largely under the radar Harmonious Dissonance gives him his due eventually and offers the rest of us a chance to draw our own conclusions The show has a top-level curator in Dean Sobel who previously headed up both the Aspen Art Museum and the Clyfford Still Museum and now teaches at the University of Denver It has a luxe space to spread out in the Redline Contemporary Art Center s slick galleries and it has solid accessible labeling on the walls as well as a catalog with essays for those who want to go deeper At Redline Sobel breaks up the work into chapters explaining in the opening text how Price emerged as part of a generation of artists in the s who meant to wrestle abstraction away from the heroics of abstract expressionism and minimalism so it could be used in more personal options In other words they referenced the basics of geometric abstraction and minimalism a style that broadly includes generations of artists from Piet Mondrian to Ellsworth Kelly but then went beyond the cold hard boundaries that had defined the genre Sobel puts it this way Price disrupts various of the features we associate with modern art collage the grid pattern repetition resulting in works that possess asymmetries misshaped geometries and similar transgressions of pure painting There are terrific examples of this at Redline and they span Price s career paintings that ask you to stare at them for a while to pick up the patterning only to watch it be revised and then revised again Take for example s Everything Happens All the Time an acrylic painting that brings together differentiated blocks of brown blue and black It is arranged in a grid with taped-off edges and repeated fields of color but it is also disarranged purposely so that the patterns of shapes and shades change radically from one side of the canvas to the other Price s skill is to keep everything balanced and orderly despite the chaos Bruce Price s Everything Happens All the Time an acrylic on canvas painting from Price has frequently painted both the front and sides of his canvases Ray Mark Rinaldi Special to The Denver Post He does this even when things appear to be nearly out of control Another example Taste from which features a collage of mismatched grids all crashing into each other at different angles on a single canvas It s a traffic accident of a painting a -car pileup of patterns and colors but it all comes together into a sort of cohesive calm Like countless of Price s paintings it feels like Minimalism He still keeps the focus on line and the challenging process of thinking through and executing this precision piece But by changing the patterns in such a radical and unpredictable way at least to bulk viewers he adds layers of intrigue Most of geometric paintings unfold in one simple gesture you see them and your brain speedily connects the dots This painting does just the opposite It reveals itself like a story a narrative with different chapters and viewpoints By exhibiting so a great number of of Price s objects together and there are hundreds in the show Harmonious Dissonance reveals not just the work but work habits too We see Price trying out new methods and novel methods of exploring the post-geometric world Along the way he experiments with three-dimensional box paintings He covers both the front and sides of his canvases and sometimes turns paintings degrees At times he leaves the canvas behind The exhibit has one table with small wooden objects and another with paper sculptures that all speak in the same language Price has used his entire career We also see his dedication to the job For example there is a wall covered with dozens of paintings all measuring inches by They are a sampling of the works Price produced at the same size over a scant years starting in a process that allowed him to work fast and on several different ideas at once without the burden of making decisions about size Sobel writes in the wall text Price s Frieze from The painter has a concurrent solo show at the Nick Ryan Gallery in Boulder Ray Mark Rinaldi Special to The Denver Post As for why Price is having his moment in he also has a concurrent solo show at Boulder s Nick Ryan Gallery which now represents him again it is hard to say Perhaps no one understood the through-line as well as this curator Perhaps the timing was bad painting that honors th-century American and European art is not exactly fashionable in in the modern day s multicultural art world and it has been that way for a decade now Perhaps Price never longed the attention But here it is and it is complete and compelling enough to raise the question Is Bruce Price Colorado s majority major living painter Certain people will laugh off that idea greatness is hard to define in an age when everyone has their own criteria for that label But selected people will embrace it and answer in the affirmative That is no small thing either IF YOU GO Harmonious Dissonance continues through Jan at Redline Arapahoe St Info - - or redlineart org Subscribe to our weekly newsletter In The Know to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox