Ken Price “Sculpture”

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St.

[Image: Ken Price "Miroesque" (1995) Fired and painted clay. 13 x 14 1/4 x 10 3/4 in.]

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Matthew Marks presents Ken Price Sculpture, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. The exhibition features fifteen small-scale sculptures in fired and painted clay and one, Lying Around (2009), in painted bronze composite that is, at almost five by eight feet, among Price’s largest works. All the works in the exhibition come from the estate of the artist.

The sculptures date from the two decades of Price’s life, when he was working at the height of his powers. The organic, sensual forms and dazzlingly vibrant surfaces of these late works have been praised by numerous critics. One wrote that Price’s sculpture of this period, “exalts color to practically metaphysical intensities.” Another wrote, “They are not just a high point in Price’s career; they represent a touchstone in the history of American art.”

Ken Price (1935–2012) was born in Los Angeles. His first one-person exhibition opened at LA’s legendary Ferus Gallery in 1960, when he was just twenty-five, and critics lauded his work for its originality. (Lucy Lippard wrote, “No one else, on either the east or west coast, is working like Ken Price.”) His work was on the cover of Artforum in 1963, and he had a one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969.

In later years 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 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.