Seth Price

Lublin, Poland, 1985

Seth Price’s (1973) multi-disciplinary work centres on the themes of distribution and circulation. His experiments with materials are conducted through a range of media including installation, sculpture, painting, collage and drawing. Through varied media, he investigates the body and the self as mediated by technology, reflecting the residual effects of the rapidly developing image-based age we live in. Price has shown extensively, with solo shows at Aspen Art Museum; MoMA PS1, NYC; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Brandhorst, Munich among others.

Ariana’s Elbow, 2015-2019

Dye-sublimation print on synthetic fabric, aluminum, LED, 134 x 233.7cm, 2015-2019. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolizzi, Berlin.

Seth Price began to focus on the human skin in 2015 attempting to capture the infinite field of pores and cells with the tools of today. He hired a commercial photographer with a high-end PhaseOne camera and constructed a professional set to take innumerable images of models’ bodies. The data gathered was not satisfactory, not high resolution enough. After a lot of research, Price found a startup in San Francisco that had the technology he was looking for and rented it for his studio in New York.

Normally, images are rendered either at enormous size but low resolution or at a small size with high resolution. Seth Price found a way to achieve both: incredibly high resolution over a large surface area. A digital camera was attached to a robotically controlled arm that could move the camera on three axes, using specialised software. Thousands of colour images were taken – it took at least six hours for each skin patch – then processed as RAW files. These were then transferred into gigantic TIFF files (two terabytes), all destined for a single artwork, and further squashed and manipulated by a specially designed software. At the time Price began conceiving of the pictures, he learned of a new printing technology commissioned by Apple for its store displays. The process employed a new type of fabric that is able to receive a dye-sublimation transfer – an extremely high-resolution print that uses heat to transfer the ink – and resists wrinkling. The finished work is a dye sub printed onto the textile at 300 dpi (standard print resolution) and fitted onto a light box, LED illuminated from behind A kind of skin on a skin – the human tissue flattened as image and then manifested as membrane. But the transposition is not only from two to three dimensions; in this operation unfathomable amounts of information are arrayed into a sprawling plane.