.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"As Satre has remarked 'Color is a man smiling, modeling, man in tears.' Price's work invokes to a remarkable degree a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous..."
(J. Coplans, "The Sculpture of Kenneth Price,' Art International, March 20, 1964, p. 33).
From the artist's major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ken Price's Big Load is a mystifying object of spectacular color and form. Implementing a truly Californian method to obtain his nearly galactic mottled surfaces, Price's old-school surfboard painting technique involves layering coats of monochrome pigment over his sculptures, and then sanding down the surface to expose brilliant effects created by revealing the layers below. As John Coplans has observed about Prices' works: "As Satre has remarked 'Color is a man smiling, modeling, man in tears.' Price's work invokes to a remarkable degree a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous.... whether he uses red, blue or green on any particular form is of little consequence. Yet Price introduces color with such an acute choice it seems almost to shape the form. He does not follow any historical lines of logic such as in folk art or advertising art, but goes back into the deepest and most buried parts of the human psyche in much the same way Brancusi did, to reinvent form. Price is practically inventing color itself at this deep and most basic of levels"(J. Coplans, "The Sculpture of Kenneth Price," Art International, March, 20, 1964, p. 33).
Not only among his earliest works to exhibit Price's distinctive mottled multicolored surfaces, Big Load further explores a certain optical play through its implantation of a black void that appears at the corner of a glowing yellow rectilinear section seemingly sliced out of the rocklike form. As interested in the empty space at the center of objects-the nothing at the heart of his somethings-as he was in his objects themselves, Price became prematurely attuned to the operations of the eye. With his mastery of the trompe l'oeil effect, Price has rendered a teasing optical play at the heart of his sculpture-causing an initial difficulty to decipher if the small black void is a painted effect, an actual hole, or even a cube itself. Resisting interpretations, Price's intimate sculptures prefer to revel in their ambiguities.
(J. Coplans, "The Sculpture of Kenneth Price,' Art International, March 20, 1964, p. 33).
From the artist's major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ken Price's Big Load is a mystifying object of spectacular color and form. Implementing a truly Californian method to obtain his nearly galactic mottled surfaces, Price's old-school surfboard painting technique involves layering coats of monochrome pigment over his sculptures, and then sanding down the surface to expose brilliant effects created by revealing the layers below. As John Coplans has observed about Prices' works: "As Satre has remarked 'Color is a man smiling, modeling, man in tears.' Price's work invokes to a remarkable degree a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous.... whether he uses red, blue or green on any particular form is of little consequence. Yet Price introduces color with such an acute choice it seems almost to shape the form. He does not follow any historical lines of logic such as in folk art or advertising art, but goes back into the deepest and most buried parts of the human psyche in much the same way Brancusi did, to reinvent form. Price is practically inventing color itself at this deep and most basic of levels"(J. Coplans, "The Sculpture of Kenneth Price," Art International, March, 20, 1964, p. 33).
Not only among his earliest works to exhibit Price's distinctive mottled multicolored surfaces, Big Load further explores a certain optical play through its implantation of a black void that appears at the corner of a glowing yellow rectilinear section seemingly sliced out of the rocklike form. As interested in the empty space at the center of objects-the nothing at the heart of his somethings-as he was in his objects themselves, Price became prematurely attuned to the operations of the eye. With his mastery of the trompe l'oeil effect, Price has rendered a teasing optical play at the heart of his sculpture-causing an initial difficulty to decipher if the small black void is a painted effect, an actual hole, or even a cube itself. Resisting interpretations, Price's intimate sculptures prefer to revel in their ambiguities.