Ken Price
Lizard Cup, 1960
ink on paper
12 x 9 inches
Now recognized as one of the most important sculptors to have emerged in Los Angeles in the past 50 years, Ken Price identified as an artist from an early age. The son and grandson of inventors who encouraged his creative endeavors, Price (1935-2012) grew up near the beach in Los Angeles and spent his youth surfing nearly every day.
Price earned a BFA in 1956 from the University of Southern California and took ceramics classes at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and Design, where he studied under Peter Voulkos. Price earned an MFA in 1959 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and had his gallery debut at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles just a year later, at the age of 25. He quickly established himself with several successful solo exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1969.
The artist was first recognized in the early 1960s for his series of “Eggs,” described by Roberta Smith for the New York Times as “intensely colored ovoids punctuated with small openings from which slimy-looking forms might protrude, suggesting fingers, phalluses, worms or perhaps entrails.” Over a career spanning five decades, Price continued to innovate the forms, colors, and surfaces of his ceramic sculptures. His whimsical biomorphic figures and subverted classical forms were instrumental in elevating clay from a craft to a fine art medium.
Ken Price exhibited extensively until his death in 2012, at his home in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, just outside of Taos. That same year a major retrospective of his work, on which he collaborated with friend and architect Frank Gehry, was staged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Works by Price are held in numerous museum collections, among them The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.