“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 many other local artists think of him as a mentor. When people talk about the most important 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 20th-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.
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 2008, and Clark Richert, who died in 2021. Both were influential on canvas and in the community, like Price, and both held that unofficial title of Colorado’s most important living painter during their lifetimes.
It has been difficult 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 public way. There was a solo show at the Denver Art Museum in 2013, 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, finally, 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 1990s who meant to “wrestle abstraction away from the heroics of abstract expressionism and minimalism so it could be used in more personal ways.”
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 many 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, 2001’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.
He does this even when things appear to be nearly out of control. Another example: “Taste,” from 2006, 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 30-car pileup of patterns and colors, but it all comes together into a sort of cohesive calm.
Like many of Price’s paintings, it feels like Minimalism 2.0. 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 most viewers), he adds layers of intrigue. Most geometric paintings unfold in one simple gesture — you see them and your brain quickly 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 many 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 ways 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 90 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 9 inches by 12. They are a sampling of the 500 works Price produced at the same size over a few years starting in 2010, a process that “allowed him to work quickly and on several different ideas at once, without the burden of making decisions about size,” Sobel writes in the wall text.
As for why Price is having his moment in 2025 — 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 20th-century American and European art is not exactly fashionable in today’s multicultural art world, and it has been that way for a decade now. Perhaps Price never wanted the attention.
But here it is, and it is complete and compelling enough to raise the question: Is Bruce Price Colorado’s most important living painter? Some people will laugh off that idea; greatness is hard to define in an age when everyone has their own criteria for that label.
But some people will embrace it, and answer in the affirmative. That is no small thing, either.
IF YOU GO
“Harmonious Dissonance” continues through Jan. 11 at Redline, 2350 Arapahoe St. Info: 720-769-2390 or redlineart.org.