Born in Los Angeles, Ken Price received his BFA from the University of Southern California in 1956 and his MFA from the famed New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. In the late 1950s, at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (later renamed the Otis College of Art and Design), Price’s ceramics professor, Peter Voulkos, encouraged the artist to create work that transcended the traditional boundaries of the medium. Price soon found his calling and within a few years was showing his own abstract clay sculptures. The curved surfaces of Price’s brilliantly colored egg sculptures, such as L. Red (1963), are disrupted by small portals that open to murky interiors or crevices with sexual and scatological associations. Among the early works in the exhibition is a group of highly colorful cups. According to Price, “The cup essentially presents a set of formal restrictions—sort of a preordained structure... But it can be used as a vehicle for ideas.”
During the 1970s and early 1980s, Price also created a series of abstracted, geometric sculptures that are brilliantly glazed and painted.Their fabrication was remarkably labor intensive, involving multiple firings and layers of glazed color. Moving into the 1980s, works such as Big Load (1988) resemble strange unearthly boulders, or meteorites, with mysterious, glowing apertures that have been sliced into the form.
Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing until his death, Price began a series of haunting, subtly erotic sculptures with mottled surfaces that he created by apply roughly 70 layers of paint that were then painstakingly sanded to uncover each stratum through variations in the pressure of the sanding process. The result, as seen in works such as Hunchback of Venice (2000), is a lyrical composition of colors held together in a layered arrangement that is unmistakably anthropomorphic. Price’s work grew in scale in later years and his glazes became even more elaborate, with complex layers of color that were scrupulously sanded to achieve a wonderfully iridescent, speckled effect of blues, purples, reds, and greens.
The installation of Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective was designed by Price’s close friend, the renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, who worked closely on the show with the artist. A number of the wood and glass vitrines that contain the sculptures were made by the artist, while the rest were inspired by his original designs.
The exhibition is organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Senior Curator and Department Head of Modern Art, Stephanie Barron, and overseen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Marla Prather, the Museum’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Date.- From June 18 to September 23 of 2013
Venue.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York.
