Ken Price

Ken Price was a Los Angeles-based ceramicist whose work ushered in new possibilities for contemporary sculpture. Invigorated, rather than bogged down, by traditional handcrafting techniques, Price’s fired clay sculptures became a definitive example of California’s emergent art scene of the 1960s and continue to be a unique body of work in 20th-century American art.

As a student, Price was particularly influenced by the craft technique of Marguerite Wildenhain. He studied under a series of accomplished ceramicists before gravitating towards surfer culture and traditional Mexican pottery on California’s Pacific coastline. After earning an MFA in New York, in 1959, Price resettled in Los Angeles, where he came to be associated with a group of young, iconoclastic artists who earned the city its first recognition from the international art world. This circle included artists John McCracken, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha, among others. From his early lustrous ovoid forms and “snail cups” to the fluid abstractions of his later work, Price’s formally impressive ceramics—with a combination of organic and geometric forms and hand-painted and glazed coloring—have retained the critical and distinctly contemporary inflection that have garnered critical attention since the 1960s.

The Menil Collection in Houston mounted a retrospective of Price’s work in 1992, followed by a major solo exhibition at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 2004. In 2012, a 50-year retrospective of Price’s work, with exhibition design by Frank Gehry, was put on by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition subsequently traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.