Elizabeth_Price_(artist)

Elizabeth Price (artist)

Elizabeth Price (artist)

British artist (born 1966)

Elizabeth Price (born 6 November 1966) is a British artist who won the Turner Prize in 2012. She is a former member of indie pop bands Talulah Gosh and The Carousel.[1][2]

Quick Facts Born, Nationality ...

Biography

Price was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire.[3] She was raised in Luton and studied at Putteridge High School before moving on to The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford as a member of Jesus College.[4][5] She continued her studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where she completed her MFA, and in 1999 she received her PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds.[2]

In 1986 Price was a founder of the Oxford-based indie pop band, Talulah Gosh, in which she was one of the singers. The band became defunct in 1988.[6]

In 2005 Price was awarded a Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, London.[7] In 2012 Price was in residence at Wysing Arts Centre. In 2012 (until 2013) she became the first artist-in-residence at the Rutherford Appleton Space Laboratory in Oxfordshire.[8]

Price was nominated for the 2012 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition 'HERE' at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, where three video works were displayed: User Group Disco (2009), The Choir (2012) and West Hinder (2012).[3][9] The 2012 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain featured her twenty-minute video installation The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (which includes elements from The Choir), for which she was awarded the prize on 3 December 2012.[10] The Guardian art critic declared the "focus and drive of Price's work, the cutting and the atmosphere, mark her out".[11]

Price says her videos take a year to make. She explained "I use digital video to try and explore the divergent forces that are at play when you bring so many different technological histories together... I’m interested in the medium of video as something you experience sensually as well as something you might recognise."[1]

Notable works

At The House of Mr X (2007)

Single channel video, 20 minutes duration

At The House of Mr X takes as its subject the preserved modernist home, and art/design collections of a deceased cosmetics mogul. It opens as a visit to the house, proceeding from the entrance through open-plan areas, into every room. The elegant geometry of the spaces, the varied materials of the architecture, and the luxurious modernist furnishings are all attentively documented. The narration - which is provided as a silent, on-screen rolling graphic is derived from various archival materials associated with the history of the house, including architectural specifications; curatorial inventories and the point-of-sale literature for various cosmetics products. As the tour moves through the house, the narration migrates through these sources so that in the final stages, the house and its art collection is described using the vocabulary of 1960s/1970s cosmetics, incorporating the puns and innuendo that hint at gender, sexual and social transformation or fluidity.[12]

In Frieze magazine, Sam Thorne wrote "The measured tones of the archivist are mixed with the fanciful lures of make-up adverts. Flashing over lascivious interior shots, a story of sensual inhabitation is developed as these cosmetics product descriptions - 'Jacobean shade', 'soft-centre candy floss’, 'starkers glow' - are gradually applied to the polished finishes of the house itself, as though it were a face. In the final section, following these transformative temptations of 'pearlise' and 'time-machinery', the viewer is invited to physically blend themselves with the liquid veneers of the house: 'Make silvery gold & viscous trails / A delightful decor/ of lustrous puddles[ ... ] To bloom on the lovely surface."[13] Price refers to this as a ‘profane denouement', a transgression of the domestic ideal in that the house itself seems to have quickened into life and 'inhabits' the guest.'[13]

At The House of Mr X has been exhibited at The Stanley Picker Gallery, London in 2007[14] - at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norway;[citation needed] Museum of Contemporary Art & Design Manila, Philippines[citation needed] and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf Germany in 2014[15] - at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts,[16] Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US in 2015[citation needed] - at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, UK in 2019.[17]

User Group Disco (2009)

Single channel video, 13 minutes duration

Redundant consumer artefacts of the late twentieth century are both glamorously featured and satirically analysed in the video User Group Disco. Cheap but extraordinarily decadent artefacts such as pet-food dispensers and necktie-storage systems are rotated, suspended and animated in front of the camera, whilst a series of quotes taken from theoretical texts on art, corporate management and taxonomy, as well as excerpts from gothic and magic-realist literature are cut together to imagine the creation and inauguration of a museum to hold them.[18]

In an ArtReview profile (2010), JJ Charlesworth describes this "One moment didactic, then cryptic, then exclamatory, the streaming over-titles of Price’s videos veer from critical meditation on the politics of art, the history of modernity and the corrupt logic of taxonomy, into passages of apocalyptic, hallucinated exuberance, in which Price’s fetishised, spinning objects – cappuccino frothers, electric wine coolers, executive toys, seventies ceramics – accelerate into a frenzy of anachronistic consumer desire…."[19] Tamara Trodd makes similar observations in an Art History essay (2019): "By materialising the idea of the objects possessing a hidden life, and having them appear to dance, Price’s playful anthropomorphism conjures up exhilarated responses in us. Even as we are made to realise and to fear the forces that slumber in material objects, somehow we are also made to laugh at them."[20]

User Group Disco has been exhibited at Spike Island in 2009;[21] at the Hayward Gallery, London, UK;[22] Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK;[23] Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland, UK;[citation needed] Plymouth Art Centre, Plymouth, UK;[24] and Pavilion, Leeds, UK in 2010;[citation needed] at the Baltic, Newcastle, UK in 2012;[25] at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK in 2013;[26] at the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada and Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norway in 2014;[citation needed] at Turku Art Museum, Finland and Hessel Museum of Art, New York, 2015;[27] - at the Model, Sligo, Ireland 2016;[28] at CAST, Helston, UK[29] and the Musee Nationale Fernande Leger, Nice, France, 2022.[30]

See also

Elizabeth Price's Website

References

  1. [1]
    Nick Clark, 'Elizabeth Price takes Turner Prize 2012 for 'seductive' video trilogy', Independent.co.uk, 3 December 2012. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
  2. [2]
    Schwarz, Gabrielle (21 February 2019). "Elizabeth Price cuts through the muddle of the digital world". Apollo – The International Art Magazine. Archived from the original on 21 February 2019. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  3. [3]
    "Turner Prize: 2012 shortlist announced", BBC News, 1 May 2012
  4. [4]
    "Elizabeth Price at lux.org.uk". Archived from the original on 4 May 2012. Retrieved 1 May 2012.
  5. [5]
    John Girth (4 July 2013). "Beatnik Girl". Oxford Today. Archived from the original on 22 December 2017. Retrieved 25 March 2016.
  6. [6]
    Sherwin, Adam (5 December 2012). "Gosh - didn't they do well?". The Independent. Retrieved 12 December 2012.
  7. [7]
    "Stanley Picker Gallery". stanleypickergallery.org. 1 September 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2021.
  8. [8]
    Elizabeth Price, Invisible Dust. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
  9. [9]
    "Baltic Plus | Elizabeth Price: HERE: Exhibition Guide". balticplus.uk. Retrieved 28 March 2021.
  10. [10]
    Tate. "'THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979', Elizabeth Price, 2012". Tate. Retrieved 28 March 2021.
  11. [11]
    Adrian Searle, 'Turner prize 2012: Elizabeth Price is a worthy winner in a vintage year', Guardian.co.uk, 3 December 2012. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
  12. [12]
    "At the House of Mr X". LUX. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  13. [13]
    Thorne, Sam (1 October 2010). "Follow Me". Frieze. No. 134. ISSN 0962-0672. Retrieved 22 March 2024.
  14. [14]
    Art, Kingston University London Kingston School of (17 May 2007). "Stanley Picker Gallery". Stanley Picker Gallery. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  15. [15]
    Düsseldorf, tm-webentwicklung GmbH; Blasberg, Cynthia (8 May 2023). "Julia Stoschek Foundation". Düsseldorf stories. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  16. [16]
    "Carpenter Center's Exhibition Recalls "The Way We Live Now" | Arts | The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  17. [17]
    "Lumen |". Lumen. 5 December 2019. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  18. [18]
    "User Group Disco". LUX. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  19. [19]
    Charlesworth, JJ (2010). "FUTURE GREATS: CRITICS' CHOICE" (PDF).
  20. [20]
    Trodd, Tamara (May 2019). "Elizabeth Price and the life of Object" (PDF). Art History. 42 (3): 566–593 – via Edinburgh Research Explorer.
  21. [21]
    "Elizabeth Price". Spike Island. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  22. [22]
    "British Art Show 7Hayward Gallery London – Sue Hubbard". Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  23. [23]
    "A Neatly Extended Middle Finger: Elizabeth Price — Mousse Magazine and Publishing". www.moussemagazine.it. 2 April 2019. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  24. [24]
    Léith, Caoimhín (January 2011). "British Art Show 7" (PDF). Frieze. 1 (136).
  25. [25]
    "BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art opens solo show by British video-maker Elizabeth Price". Museum Publicity. 3 February 2012. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  26. [26]
    "User Group Disco". National Galleries of Scotland. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  27. [27]
    Greenlaw, Lavinia (25 September 2015). "Trying to Escape a Pattern". Frieze. No. 174. ISSN 0962-0672. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  28. [28]
    "Elizabeth Price". The Model, Sligo. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  29. [29]
    "USER GROUP DISCO". CAST | Cornwall. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
  30. [30]
    "Elizabeth Price, User Group Disco". musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr. Retrieved 24 March 2024.
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