Ken Price

Private Collection, California (acquired directly from the artist)

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no noted condition issues with this work.
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Over the course of six decades, between the 1950's and his death in 2012, Ken Price was a pioneer in the field of post-war Contemporary sculpture. Price was singular in elevating his preferred material – clay – from a humble craft material to fine art. Price studied under renowned sculptor Peter Voulkos at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, who had a formative influence on the artist's methods of sculpting. Voulkos, who had previously taught up and coming artists Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College and was rubbing shoulders with Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning in New York, introduced Price to the larger art scene.

Just a few years later, at the age of 25, Price went on to have his first solo show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1960. Price’s work from this period had a rougher, more primitive aesthetic that highlighted the materiality of the clay and were finished with a glazed surface, quite similar in appearance to the heavy, abstract sculptures of Voulkos. In the early to mid-1960’s, his style evolved to a more surrealist, slightly suggestive, anthropomorphic style, in a petite, handheld scale.

Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Price experimented frequently with form, even creating vases, cups and bowls for a time. In the 1990's, Price began creating his signature “blobs” and “slumps” – names for the oozing, viscous objects that Price is perhaps best known for – and continued to expand and explore this genre throughout his career. With these strange, amorphous, almost extraterrestrial forms, his methods became more complex; Price would fire the clay, sand it down and smooth it, add layer upon layer of acrylic paint, and then go back and add texture and patterns by meticulously using a Q-tip to remove layers of paint in spots. This time consuming exercise meant that it could often take years to complete a single sculpture. A photograph of Price’s studio from 1997 shows the current work, Bams, in progress, though it wasn’t completed until 2003. Bams glows with a bright, iridescent green hue and speckled surface. Upon closer appearance, the dots have depth, revealing a pink underlayer poking through. The perfect, handheld size gives the work a tactility and intimate relationship with the viewer that mystifies and intrigues. Art historian David Hickey writes, “From one vantage point you might think you’re looking at something that is decidedly abstract. However, when you move to another spot, you might recognize something that seems referential. But, in the end, it’s like searching for images in clouds.”

In recent years, Price has received much critical praise and institutional attention with museum shows and retrospectives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Price’s work has always been beloved by his artistic contemporaries, and his work is seen in the private art collections of fellow artists Larry Bell, Lynda Benglis, Vija Celmins, Sam Francis, Frank Gehry, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden and Frank Stella, among others. As architect Frank Gehry once remarked, “I can’t imagine living in a place without a Ken Price.”