Welcome to a selection of Rory Price's recent paintings, created between 2024 and 2026. The exhibition brings together works produced during his time at Culterim alongside earlier paintings that are being shown publicly for the first time.

The title of the exhibition is a play on words. Aqua Vitae is Latin for "water of life" and traditionally refers to whisky and other distilled spirits. Price draws on this phrase to playfully reference his Scottish heritage, while also alluding to themes that run throughout his work. Grandiose landscapes merge with urban dystopias, creating scenes that are at once familiar and dreamlike.
Price creates images that brim with indulgence, impulse, and expression. Paint becomes a tool for conjuring worlds and altering perceptions. His work moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, with recurring motifs, figures, roads, bottles, mountains, and buildings, colliding to form a distinctive visual language.

The exhibition title also echoes Curriculum Vitae, Latin for "course of life", commonly abbreviated as CV. In this sense, the paintings can be understood as reflections of the artist's inner world and of his life spent between Scotland and Berlin.

Throughout these works, alcohol appears in many forms: as a source of pleasure and sociability, a catalyst for excess and hedonism, and a cause of ruin, delusion, and despair. Price's intention is neither to glorify nor condemn, although perhaps he occasionally leans toward the former, but rather to observe and reflect upon the substance itself, its cultural presence, and the many ways it shapes human experience.