WALTER PRICE’S first major institutional exhibition in Britain includes an intriguing group of new paintings and drawings made during lockdown in New York, where he is based.

During that period Price, who is in his thirties and has been exhibiting since 2013, used up whatever materials were on hand in the studio, without ordering in anything new.

That meant he sometimes had to work with the last knockings of his acrylic paints, mixing them with white and producing works dominated by pastel colours.

It may also explain the presence of various odds and ends, including electrical tape and torn-out pages from notebooks that are used to construct some kind of hybrid between painting, drawing and collage.

This is most obviously on display in the first of a two-room exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in London, where the initial encounter is with nine small works that feature a recurring motif of hats made from red insulation tape, interspersed with groups of black faces essayed in crayon.

A second wall features the largest material, all on white paper — human-size and dotted around with pastel paint and blodges of black. The torn notebooks and tape are here again, helping to create images that hint at urbanisation and mechanical devices. It’s a world of ladders, cranes and stairways.

Most of the motifs appear indistinct, yet some give a clearer impression — a woman’s shoe, a footprint, the sun — and, without quite knowing how or why, each of the nine scenes suggests the idea of a specific outdoor place.

After eight works on the third wall that feel more autobiographical and less Covid-related, there’s a line of paintings on cardboard of exaggeratedly rounded, muscular nudes in black paint, while on wall four the theme returns to lockdown with 10 compositions of New Yorkers going about their daily lives in masks: jogging, at the gym, in the barber’s shop or at a dance class.

Employing the full range of Price’s versatility, they set the scene for room two, where the feeling is much more strongly of restriction.

Twenty-three paintings feature figures looking out into the brightness, evoking feelings of domestic isolation tinged with hope, while vague images project the idea of armchairs, hazy front-room scenes and the detritus of everyday indoor living before the last four compositions suggest a final opening up.

It’s highly accomplished art, somewhere between figuration and abstraction, which cleverly conveys meaning without moving into specifics. It’s a great advert for the power of suggestion.

Runs until August 29. Free. Advance bookings: camdenartcentre.org