Narbi Price

Narbi Price’s work features seemingly everyday scenes which hold additional historical, cultural or personal significance, applying diverse techniques to a photographically derived painting style. It takes sites of chosen events and considers notions of collective memory, pilgrimage and history through the act of painting. He is interested in painting as a receptacle for memory, and in how collective and personal memory can be evoked visually. 

During the pandemic, he produced a large series of work showing taped up public benches. He says, ‘I noticed friends posting pictures online of benches enrobed with red and white hazard tape, preventing the benches being used for that which they were intended. The result was a kind of three-dimensional calligraphy, the tape wrapped around the bars and planks of the benches, a casual quotidian rhythm making marks in space, different on each bench, like a Poundshop Christo.

I gave friends instructions on how to compose source photographs for me, and this became a chance lockdown collaboration, between the unknown worker who wrapped the benches, my friends who photographed them, and myself who painted them. All working in isolation. These paintings developed into a large body of work and proved to be very popular. I think they captured something of the surreal quality of lockdown, and spoke of the COVID zeitgeist.’

He is currently working on a large body of paintings called ‘Going Back Brockens’, reflecting on the legacy of the Miners’ Strike in County Durham.

Biography
Narbi Price studied at Northumbria and Newcastle Universities. His PhD was entitled ‘Repainting the Pitmen: The Ashington Art Group & Robert Lyon – Rethinking Legacy through Archive and Practice’. It explored the legacy of The Ashington Group of artists (also known as the Pitmen Painters) through the production of a new body of paintings and the curation of two exhibitions and publications. It looked at the post-industrial landscape of Northumberland through the lens of previous artistic activity. 

Narbi was the winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2017, Journal Culture Awards Visual Artist of the Year in 2018, and Prizewinner in John Moores Painting Prize in 2012, his work is featured in Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin P3 – New Perspectives in Painting.’

He is a trustee of The Ashington Group collection, and the current Chair of Contemporary British Painting.