Untitled Bench Painting (Lockdown) 4

Acrylic on panel
70cm x 100cm

Narbi Price is a painter based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

He was the Journal Culture Awards Visual Artist of the Year 2018, and the winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2017. He was featured in Phaidon’s Vitamin P3 – New Perspectives in Painting and was a prizewinner in the John Moores Painting Prize 2012. He was shortlisted for The New Light Art Prize in 2020.

Critic Matthew Collings, said of his work in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019, “Qualities of skill and imagination, as well as a sympathetic feel for the ordinary, make Narbi Price’s pictures eerily noticeable.. It appears photographic but up close it jumps into a completely different dimension, becoming dancing loose dots and blips, free of any representation whatsoever. Even once the painting’s double nature is absorbed, it is hard to comprehend how on earth he did it”

This piece is part of ‘The Lockdown Paintings’, a series of work and a publication showing wrapped, decommissioned benches seen in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sight that became ubiquitous with the period for many.