Ken Price

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Ken Price: Pluto Ware. The exhibition features over forty ceramics and twenty works on paper made between 1993 and 1996, all of which are exhibited here for the first time.

The title Pluto Ware is a pun on the word pollution. With their images of factories and refineries spewing dark clouds and ominous oil slicks often in brilliantly colored landscapes, the Pluto Ware allowed Price to explore his unique aesthetic while also raising awareness of the effect of industry on the American landscape.

As early as 1964 John Coplans wrote that Price’s work “invokes to a remarkable degree a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous” and praises Price’s “physically brilliant” use of color as “dark, murky, very elemental and primordial.”

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 Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 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.