Ken Price Sculpture: a Retrospective

A 50-year retrospective of one of the least known, first rate American artists, Ken Price, recognized for his fired and painted clay ceramic work, opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Organized by LACMA's senior curator of modern art Stephanie Barron, the exhibit features Ken Price's abstract sculptures creatively accentuated by his close friend, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank O. Gehry who designed the settings and lighting.

Linking minimalism and postmodernism abstract art, Ken Price infuses color and form like no other artist, drawing the viewer closer towards the depth, color composition and shape from different vantage points.

Strongly influenced by his ceramic artist teacher Peter Voulkos, Price studied also with Billy Al Bengston, John Mason, Mike Frimkess, Paul Soldner, Henry Takemoto, and Jerry Rothman.

This retrospective is bitter sweet since Ken Price, involved in every stage of the exhibit's planning and installation, past away this year in February.

Presented in reverse chronological order, the exhibit's first gallery displays the mottled sculptures for which the artist is most well-known, from 2000 to 2011, consisting of sculpture surfaces sanded through roughly seventy layers of vibrant colors.

The middle gallery highlights the most significant styles of his prolific career from 1959 to 2000, marked by geometric shapes intricately painted and glazed. Included are slumps, rocks, geometrics, cups, eggs and mounds as well as eleven works on paper and two large-scale sculptures from 2011 to 2012.

On view in the last gallery are the artist's last three works as well as three of the Happy's Curios series (1972 to 1977), an homage to Mexican pottery, named after Ken's wife, Happy.

Original and compelling, this retrospective is a great tribute to an American artist who redefined contemporary sculptures.

Following LACMA, the exhibit will travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (February 9 - May 12, 2013) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 18 - September 22, 2013).

The exhibit runs from September 16, 2012 through January 6, 2013, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. For more information call (323) 857-6000 or visit www.lacma.org