Bio
Ken Price (1935–2012) was an American artist who helped establish ceramics as a vital medium for contemporary sculpture. Working primarily in Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, Price made objects that were often small enough to hold but had a presence well beyond their scale. His sculptures draw on the familiar shapes of cups, rocks, waves, and bodies, giving them a character that is at once sensual, comic, and strange.
Born in Los Angeles, Price studied with Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute and received an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1959. He began exhibiting at Ferus Gallery in 1960, alongside artists including Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. His early egg-shaped sculptures and cups used the intimacy of handheld objects to surprising effect. Small openings and protrusions gave the eggs an almost bodily presence, while frogs and other creatures turned up in his cups. After moving to Taos in the early 1970s, Price drew on Mexican folk pottery for Happy’s Curios, an expansive project that brought ceramics together in cabinets and display cases.
The crisp edges and intersecting planes of his sculptures from the 1980s gave way to forms that bulge, sag, and fold into themselves. In works such as Laird (2010), the clay looks as though it might still be moving. Price built up dozens of layers of colored acrylic paint on fired clay, then sanded the surface to expose different colors at different depths. The resulting flecks and patches shift across each curve, making color inseparable from the shape of the sculpture.
Drawing was central to Price’s practice throughout his career. His works on paper move between Los Angeles freeways and palm-lined skylines, the high desert around Taos, and seascapes and erupting volcanoes inspired by his visits to Hawai‘i. In these drawings, a breaking wave or a flow of lava has much the same unruly energy as his late sculptures.
The Walker Art Center and the Menil Collection presented Price’s first retrospective in 1992. Two decades later, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, which opened in 2012 and traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2013, the Drawing Center presented the first survey of his works on paper, which traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.
Price’s sculpture and works on paper are held in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Menil Collection, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. International holdings include the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Design Museum Den Bosch in the Netherlands, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
In the Kansas City area, Price’s work is held by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. The Nelson-Atkins collection includes Untitled (1980), a glazed porcelain sculpture whose sharply defined planes show how Price used color to articulate volume.
