NYAB Event - Ken Price “Specimen Rocks”

Ken Price “Specimen Rocks”

Matthew Marks Gallery 526 W 22nd St.

This event has ended.

Matthew Marks presents Ken Price: Specimen Rocks, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 W 22nd Street. The exhibition includes seven ceramic sculptures made between 1983 and 1984, many of which have never been shown publicly. Each sculpture is displayed in its own vitrine designed by the artist.

Ken Price began the Specimen Rocks shortly after moving to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1983. Combining coarse-textured areas and smooth planes, and finished with metallic and gloss paints, the sculptures recall Price’s Slate Cups (1972-78) while evoking more gem-like mineral formations. As Price has pointed out, the sculptures’ hand-held scale draws the viewer in for a personal experience of their physical details, but the works can also be thought of as maquettes: “You can see the whole piece and all of its surface detail in one glance. So it’s very easy to visualize those pieces as being any size, especially monumental.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring actual-size photographs of twelve Specimen Rocks sculptures plus a selection of quotes by Ken Price.

Ken Price was born in Los Angeles in 1935. In 1959 he returned to LA after studying on the East Coast and quickly became part of the emerging art community that had grown up around the Ferus Gallery. During his lifetime he had one-person museum exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969); the Menil Collection, Houston (1992); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1992); and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa (2004). In 2012 a major retrospective of his work opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last year the Drawing Center, in collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, organized the first survey of Price’s works on paper, exhibiting sixty-five drawings spanning fifty years.