Collection: Glimpse

Bermondsey-based artist Alex Price uses painting to explore the fragile space between seeing and understanding. His work questions how meaning emerges—or unravels—through a visual language where abstraction and representation remain in constant dialogue.

The twelve paintings in this exhibition take their titles from Samuel Beckett’s what is the word, a poem in which the author grapples with the limits of language and the slipperiness of meaning. Each title suggests something partial, momentary, just out of reach—an encounter with an image or idea that resists full comprehension.

This conceptual thread runs throughout the series. Alex draws on compositions and colour palettes from a range of sources—from Turner to Cézanne to Morandi—transforming fragments of art history into layered contemporary enquiries into material, perception, and interpretation. From afar, the works hint at recognisable forms; up close, they dissolve into marks that resist explanation and assert their own material presence.

These are paintings that invite slow looking. Meaning isn’t delivered but sensed. The surface of each canvas becomes a site of negotiation between clarity and opacity, inviting the viewer into an open-ended encounter—one shaped by fleeting glimpses and shifting impressions.