KEN PRICE

KEN PRICE (1935-)

For over 40 years Ken Price has been heavily invested in the creation and innovation of form and color in ceramic sculpture. His adventurous work has pushed the boundaries of structure and glazing, creating remarkably lively shapes and color patterns and cementing his reputation as one of the most influential artists working in the medium today. This volume highlights Price's newest work as well as a retrospective sampling from the artist's long career in sculpture and drawing. Price's recent sensuously shaped fetish-like objects are meticulously painted and sanded to create rich, patterned skins with jewel-like surfaces. His brilliantly-colored drawings depict an often fantastic realm of rushing lava, raging seas and roaming creatures. A very important facet of Price's oeuvre, the drawings highlight themes that run throughout his work, and show Price to be a fine and original draftsman. In addition to the 60 color reproductions included here, fellow Los Angeles artist Vija Celmins contributes an interview with Price, further investigating his motivations and processes, contextualized in the California art community he helped to create.

About the Author
Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, and immigrated to North America with her family when she was 10 years old. Since the 60s she has received international attention for her renditions of natural scenesooften copied from photographs that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernible depth of field. A master of several mediums, including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes, Celmins matches a tangible sense of space with sensuous detail in each work. She received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and retrospectives of her work have traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. In 2002, a retrospective of her prints was held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Celmins currently resides in New York and California.

Ken Price was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1935. Having received his MFA in 1959 from Alfred University, Price quickly became a part of the emerging Los Angeles art community centred around the Ferus Gallery. Constantly developing his craft in both sculpture and drawing, he has exhibited his work regularly since that time, including one-person museum exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and, most recently, the Chinati Foundation, Marfa. Price lives and works in New Mexico and Los Angeles.