Harmonious Dissonance:
Bruce Price Retrospective
Celebrating the five-decade career of American artist and one of RedLine’s first Resource Artists, Bruce Price
November 14, 2025 - January 11, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, November 14, 6-8pm
About Harmonious Dissonance
This exhibition surveys the five-decade career of American artist and one of RedLine’s first Resource Artists, Bruce Price. Known primarily as a painter, this exhibition—Price’s largest and most comprehensive—will consider not only significant painting series made since the 1980s, but also his lesser-known activities in sculpture, drawing, collage, and installation.
The exhibition is curated by Dean Sobel, Professor of the Practice of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Denver, in close cooperation with the artist. Other contributors include Michael Paglia, art critic, curator, educator, and a script writer; Jason Hoelscher, artist and professor of interdisciplinary art at Georgia Southern University, Savannah; and Hélène Grall-Johnson, former professor at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and the University of Denver.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by both Sobel and Price. Funding for the catalogue has been provided by the Clemens Fund at the School of Art and Art History, University of Denver.
Price works primarily with abstraction and its many histories. His art can be seen as part of a common tendency in recent art: to wrestle abstraction away from the heroics of abstract expressionism and minimalism, while imbuing it with more personal forms and structures.
Price frequently uses grids, equations, and sequences as a basis for his images, which are often disrupted by asymmetries and mis-shaped geometries.
In certain instances, Price has incorporated pre-printed fabrics, such as gingham, extending his interests into materiality and pattern, while invoking themes of domesticity, biography, and cultural mythology.
His work runs—in curious and compelling ways—both in and out of mainstream theories and practices over the last half-century. From the outset, Price’s artistic practice has, at various times, been involved with issues of process, systems, materiality, and his dictum of “abandon anything, at any time, for any reason.”
This exhibition will reveal other tendencies, including the distortion of patterns, chaos as order, and means of expressing transgression and difference.
About Bruce Price
Born in 1958 and raised in Kansas and Indiana, Bruce Price initially studied music performance at the Interlochen Arts Academy, World Youth Symphony, and National High School Orchestra.
By the mid-1980s, after performing professionally, he gravitated to fine art, studying first at Denver’s Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, followed by an MFA in interdisciplinary studies from Maine College of Art.
Price felt the impact of literary criticism common in art departments at that time, such as Gilles Deleuze and his studio advisor, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, but he was equally drawn to science, particularly emergence theory, which provided a conceptual grounding which is still evident.
Beyond his studio practice, Price has also served as Director of RMCAD’s Institute for Experimental Studies and founding resident advisor for RedLine.
Bruce Price Retrospective Opening Reception
Join us for the dual opening reception of the Brice Price Retrospective and the Dr. Hamlin Collection on Friday, November 14, 6-8pm
Contributors
Dean Sobel is professor of the practice of art history and museum studies at the University of Denver. Sobel was founding Director of the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Director/Chief Curator at the Aspen Art Museum, and Chief Curator/Curator of Contemporary Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. He has organized over 80 thematic and one-artist exhibitions, including retrospectives of Vito Acconci and Jackie Winsor and projects with Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, Robert Mangold, Cindy Sherman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Stan Douglas, Thomas Demand, and Olafur Eliasson.
Hélène Grall-Johnson is a former professor at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and the University of Denver. She holds bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Bordeaux, in France, an MPhil degree, in Geology, from Yale University, and a PhD, in Geological Oceanography, from the University of Rhode Island. Her interests include geochemistry, volcanology, marine geology, and science education.
Jason Hoelscher is an artist and professor of interdisciplinary art at Georgia Southern University, Savannah. He received a PhD in aesthetics and art theory from IDSVA, an MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute, a BFA in painting and drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and certificates in complex systems from the New England Complex Systems Institute, Boston. His writings have appeared in ARTnews and ArtPulse, and his book Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2021) was nominated for the American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Award and the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present Book of the Year Award in 2022.
Michael Paglia has worked as an art critic, a curator, an educator and a script writer. His principal focus has been the art and architecture of Colorado and the American West. His columns appeared in Westword, a Denver weekly, from 1995 to 2020. His reviews have also been published in Art News, Architecture, Modernism, Art & Auction, Sculpture and Art Ltd. In addition, Paglia has been an author or co-author of more than a dozen monographs and books, notably Colorado Abstract and Texas Abstract.
