Seth Price. Social Synthetic

This catalogue is the first comprehensive publication on Price's varied oeuvre. It offers an unflinching portrait of contemporary, mediated Western life. The exhibition at Stedelijk Museum is the first survey of the American artist's work.A key theme in Price's work is the self under technological pressure. This is often expressed in terms of the 'skins' of surface, packaging, and wrapping: a photographic study of a person's skin obtained through the technologies Google employs for mapping; a vacuum-formed plastic relief presenting a body part stranded in plastic; a large wall sculpture depicting the negative space between two people engaged in intimate action, greatly enlarged from a tiny internet jpeg.'Seth Price is a key figure in addressing technology and artistic authorship. His work traces an important art historical shift from the concept of collage, where chance played a major role and the image was constructed of multiple layers, to the concept of a unified image, which envelops us in an endless, undifferentiated, digital stream.' - Beatrix Ruf, Director of Stedelijk MuseumPublished on the occasion of the exhibition Seth Price: Social Synthetic, at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (15 April - 3 September 2017), and at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (12 October 2017 - 18 March 2018).