Ken Price

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Ken Price: Sculpture (2001–2011). The exhibition features eighteen sculptures from the estate of the artist, many of which are exhibited here for the first time.

Ken Price’s career spans over fifty years. His highly influential, brightly colored small-scale works helped redefine contemporary sculpture. Made from fired and painted clay, the works in the exhibition date from the last decade of the artist’s life, what Price himself referred to as his “golden period.” Praised for their sensual forms and dizzying mastery of color, these later sculptures with their seductively smooth, richly colored surfaces are the result of Price’s technique of building up and sanding down up to seventy layers of paint. As one critic noted, Price’s “odd, biomorphic shapes are thrillingly executed and bewitchingly mysterious.”

Ken Price (1935–2012) was born in Los Angeles. After graduating from college in 1959, Price returned to Los Angeles and was given his first one-person exhibition at the now legendary Ferus Gallery in 1960. Price had one-person exhibitions at the Menil Collection in Houston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In 2012, shortly before his untimely passing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a retrospective of his work, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. In 2013 the Drawing Center in New York, in collaboration with Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, organized the first survey of Price’s works on paper.