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Lot Essay
Ken Price’s Kabongy Balls is a striking example of the California sculptor’s singular practice. Executed in 2002, the polychrome ceramic sculpture stands on the two pillars of Price’s practice: form and finish. Perhaps mastery of these two qualities is required of every accomplished sculptor, but Price, arguably more successfully than any other artist of the last half century, has combined them in radical ways that distinguish him in the field. Relentlessly innovative, the artist’s work would undergo various evolutions before arriving at the style for which he is perhaps best known, and of which Kabongy Balls is an illustrative example. Using iridescent flecks of paint on organic forms, Price’s later sculptures appear extraterrestrial, ancient and cuttingly contemporary all at once.
Resembling a giant distorted gourd or perhaps a shimmering fossilized cephalopod, this work has a style all its own, separate and apart from the handful of sculptural styles dominant since the 1960s. Eschewing any hint of irony, insincerity, or winking art-historical nodding, Kabongy Balls is radical in its impeccable craftsmanship and sincerity. Price, who emerged in the era of California Finish Fetish artists, has always been concerned with texture and surface but, unlike those artists, creates decidedly organic forms derived from the natural—as opposed to the industrial—world.
With its copper colored basecoat and pink, blue, and red specks, the sculpture further connects itself to the natural world. Earthen colors bolster its organic look, suggesting an organism in some sort of transitional phase. Nearly writhing, the sculpture’s tentacle-like elements seem to pull away from the central spire as if preparing for a large-scale cellular division. Its heavy, bulbous extremities give the form a natural and believable sense of mass that, in its solidity, casts off age-old notions of clay and the functional role of ceramics more broadly.
Dispensing with tradition, Price solidifies the typically fragile medium. Solid and stable, Kabongy Balls delights in its own dismissal of artistic norms. Neither functional, monumental, representational nor entirely abstract, this particular example, and Ken Price’s sculpture more broadly, thrives in its irreverent uniqueness. Existing in a perpetually mercurial zone, his sculpture occupies an art-historical grey area. Never solidly pinned to one group or movement, Price’s ageless body of work spans a period known for breakneck changes in taste, gliding over them like a surfer on a wave. Kabongy Balls reflects Price’s remarkable self-assuredness and, in one sculpture, captures the essence of a storied five-decade career in art.
Resembling a giant distorted gourd or perhaps a shimmering fossilized cephalopod, this work has a style all its own, separate and apart from the handful of sculptural styles dominant since the 1960s. Eschewing any hint of irony, insincerity, or winking art-historical nodding, Kabongy Balls is radical in its impeccable craftsmanship and sincerity. Price, who emerged in the era of California Finish Fetish artists, has always been concerned with texture and surface but, unlike those artists, creates decidedly organic forms derived from the natural—as opposed to the industrial—world.
With its copper colored basecoat and pink, blue, and red specks, the sculpture further connects itself to the natural world. Earthen colors bolster its organic look, suggesting an organism in some sort of transitional phase. Nearly writhing, the sculpture’s tentacle-like elements seem to pull away from the central spire as if preparing for a large-scale cellular division. Its heavy, bulbous extremities give the form a natural and believable sense of mass that, in its solidity, casts off age-old notions of clay and the functional role of ceramics more broadly.
Dispensing with tradition, Price solidifies the typically fragile medium. Solid and stable, Kabongy Balls delights in its own dismissal of artistic norms. Neither functional, monumental, representational nor entirely abstract, this particular example, and Ken Price’s sculpture more broadly, thrives in its irreverent uniqueness. Existing in a perpetually mercurial zone, his sculpture occupies an art-historical grey area. Never solidly pinned to one group or movement, Price’s ageless body of work spans a period known for breakneck changes in taste, gliding over them like a surfer on a wave. Kabongy Balls reflects Price’s remarkable self-assuredness and, in one sculpture, captures the essence of a storied five-decade career in art.