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拍品專文
The works by Ken Price from the Clarke’s collection stand on the pillars of the artist’s practice: form, finish, and a unique vision. Price produced a disruptive and radical art more successfully than any other artist of the last half century. His ceramic forms, both organic and architectural, turned a creative process dating back thousands of years into a resolutely contemporary art form. Gallery owner Frank Lloyd has stated that Price came of age in the 1960s, “… [during] a period of rapid change in perception of what you could do with an individual medium. Ceramics had a particular history, and [he]… broke out of that tradition and also sought individual expression through it” (F. Lloyd, “Culture Monster,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2012, via https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/02/kenneth-price-dies-ceramics-artist.html).
Ken Price’s exquisitely finished abstract ceramic sculptures distinguished him as an outstanding artist in postwar America. As a revolutionary ceramicist, he dismantled the distinction between art and craft by liberating the clay medium from functional pottery and instead employing it as a contemporary art form. Emerging in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, Price’s innovative works exploit ceramics and its sculptural possibilities, unusual textures and surface, and erotic innuendos of form, as well as ushered in vibrant synthetic colors into modern sculpture. His works range from organic and biomorphic abstractions to architectural, geometric and geological constructions. With a stylistically diverse practice, Price synthesizes Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, Japanese prints and ceramics, Mexican tourist wares, and popular culture into his intriguing and sophisticated creations.
One of Price’s greatest artistic achievements was fomenting the ceramic revolution in Southern California that insisted on ceramics as a high art form. At age 22, Price studied under Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, a ceramics master who had learned with famed potters Bernard Leach and Soji Hamada. Voulkos was a proponent of profound change in ceramic art, freeing the clay medium from the potter’s wheel and careful glazing to creating fine art with it. In his lineage, Price created intriguing and sophisticated clay sculptures through slab building, denting, cracking, and introducing new types of commercial paints. Price was also contemporaries with LA artists Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, and Edward Keinholz, and studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, the Otis Art Institute and the Santa Monica City College. By his mid-20s, he already had three exhibitions at the legendary Ferus Gallery, was featured on the cover of Artforum magazine by 1963, and had showcased at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Price’s contribution to the Los Angeles’ ceramic revolution became a significant source of inspiration for a new generation of artists.
Price’s most extended series is a brilliant variation on the ordinary tea cup. Approaching ceramics through drawing, he once noted, “Drawing is a way of seeing what you’re thinking about” (K. Price quoted in P. Schimmel and S. Thorne, Ken Price: A Survey of Sculptures and Drawings, Munich, 2017, p. 31). The artist tested ideas, planned and experimented with the possibilities of forms and volume on paper before bringing them into three-dimension. For Price, the intimate was as a powerful scale as the monumental, and his cup drawings took on a slightly elevated perspective, looking down onto the vessels. His earliest cup drawings in the 1960s were small and comic-like, such as Acrobatic Frog Cup, 1968, which has a leaping frog for its handle, giving the vessels a life of its own. Other drawings illustrate the influence of Japanese ceramic traditions, where Price had traveled for six months in 1962. He was interested in the traditional Japanese ceramics of the Momoyama period (1573-1615), which celebrated minimalist forms of hand-shaped bowls. The influence of the East is seen in the Chinese Figurine Cup IV, 1968, an intimate technical rendering of a rust orange cup.
The 1970s for Price was defined by working on his 1978 solo exhibition at LACMA titled Happy’s Curious - a room-size installation of cabinets holdings hundreds, of cups, bowls, vases, and plates in various styles. After relocating to Taos from L.A. in 1972, Price explained: “Coming to New Mexico influenced my work right away. Just before we left L.A. I’d been making some cups, so I tried to incorporate the New Mexico landscape into that idiom – and made rock cups, slate cups, and crystal cups, which developed into a long series of geometric cups… which I never would have done had I lived somewhere else” (K. Price quoted in S. Barron and F.O. Gehry, eds., Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, Munich, 2012, p. 24). In homage to Mexican pottery and the desert landscape, Price created a group of handmade brightly colored non-serviceable slate cups. Untitled (Purple Slate Cup), 1972-1978, and Slate Cup II, 1972, have sharply intersecting geological planes, suggesting oceanside cliffs or homes overhanging water’s edge, as seen in architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Golden orange, adobe red and purple accentuate each plane of the cups. Glazing with glossy primary colors is also seen in Price’s architectural and geometric cups. Untitled (Geo. Cup), 1975, is a highly colored multipart cup, and Architectural Cup, 1974, is a detailed work on paper of a geometric cup with different colored planes, resembling abstract Bauhaus architecture. By the late 1980s, his vessels incorporated this geometry into organic shapes with a sculpture series of nebulous spherical sculptures that have a geometric hole in its center. Price noted: “I moved geometry to the inside of the piece and made outer forms more amorphous” (K. Price quoted in S. Barron and F.O. Gehry, eds., Ken Price Sculpture, p. 31). Untitled 'Price 90’, 1990, is an exquisite watercolor drawing of these inside/outside pieces that juxtaposes a purple geometric interior with a green biomorphic exterior. Price’s wide ranging cup series exquisitely combines high and low art, folk and fine art, pottery and ceramics.
In the early 1990s, Price moved from the desert back to LA where the urban city penetrated his work. His drawings no longer were preliminary experimentations or two dimensional counterparts for his ceramic vessels and sculptures, but had meanings and iconography of their own. Untitled (Interior), 1992, belongs to a series of representations of the urban landscape filled with smoke and pollution Price completed in this period. The watercolor and ink on paper work depicts a quiet interior, with two windows that look out onto a motel exterior, building and long palms. The uniform trees raise above the towering buildings in the distance, showing Price’s concern with the balance between nature and the city.
Price then returned to biomorphic abstract ceramic sculptures and striking use of color. Altoon, 2005, is a masterful example of his molten-like plump pieces with tightly coiled tendrils drooping down and rising up upon one another. The layered and erotic sloping curves and viscous forms resemble Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and the shapes of Surrealist Joan Miró. Executed in the artist’s final decade, which he called the ‘golden period’, Altoon’s iridescent surface was created with Price’s polished method of applying thin layers of vibrant acrylic paint atop one another, then sanding down areas to reveal the hidden colors, giving the sculpture a marbled and stippled appearance. Price’s bold color and forms simultaneously pay homage to the Abstract Expressionists and Modernist Sculptors, while throwing off tradition in a revolution to insert ceramics and the clay medium into the realm of high art.
Ken Price’s exquisitely finished abstract ceramic sculptures distinguished him as an outstanding artist in postwar America. As a revolutionary ceramicist, he dismantled the distinction between art and craft by liberating the clay medium from functional pottery and instead employing it as a contemporary art form. Emerging in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, Price’s innovative works exploit ceramics and its sculptural possibilities, unusual textures and surface, and erotic innuendos of form, as well as ushered in vibrant synthetic colors into modern sculpture. His works range from organic and biomorphic abstractions to architectural, geometric and geological constructions. With a stylistically diverse practice, Price synthesizes Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, Japanese prints and ceramics, Mexican tourist wares, and popular culture into his intriguing and sophisticated creations.
One of Price’s greatest artistic achievements was fomenting the ceramic revolution in Southern California that insisted on ceramics as a high art form. At age 22, Price studied under Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, a ceramics master who had learned with famed potters Bernard Leach and Soji Hamada. Voulkos was a proponent of profound change in ceramic art, freeing the clay medium from the potter’s wheel and careful glazing to creating fine art with it. In his lineage, Price created intriguing and sophisticated clay sculptures through slab building, denting, cracking, and introducing new types of commercial paints. Price was also contemporaries with LA artists Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, and Edward Keinholz, and studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, the Otis Art Institute and the Santa Monica City College. By his mid-20s, he already had three exhibitions at the legendary Ferus Gallery, was featured on the cover of Artforum magazine by 1963, and had showcased at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Price’s contribution to the Los Angeles’ ceramic revolution became a significant source of inspiration for a new generation of artists.
Price’s most extended series is a brilliant variation on the ordinary tea cup. Approaching ceramics through drawing, he once noted, “Drawing is a way of seeing what you’re thinking about” (K. Price quoted in P. Schimmel and S. Thorne, Ken Price: A Survey of Sculptures and Drawings, Munich, 2017, p. 31). The artist tested ideas, planned and experimented with the possibilities of forms and volume on paper before bringing them into three-dimension. For Price, the intimate was as a powerful scale as the monumental, and his cup drawings took on a slightly elevated perspective, looking down onto the vessels. His earliest cup drawings in the 1960s were small and comic-like, such as Acrobatic Frog Cup, 1968, which has a leaping frog for its handle, giving the vessels a life of its own. Other drawings illustrate the influence of Japanese ceramic traditions, where Price had traveled for six months in 1962. He was interested in the traditional Japanese ceramics of the Momoyama period (1573-1615), which celebrated minimalist forms of hand-shaped bowls. The influence of the East is seen in the Chinese Figurine Cup IV, 1968, an intimate technical rendering of a rust orange cup.
The 1970s for Price was defined by working on his 1978 solo exhibition at LACMA titled Happy’s Curious - a room-size installation of cabinets holdings hundreds, of cups, bowls, vases, and plates in various styles. After relocating to Taos from L.A. in 1972, Price explained: “Coming to New Mexico influenced my work right away. Just before we left L.A. I’d been making some cups, so I tried to incorporate the New Mexico landscape into that idiom – and made rock cups, slate cups, and crystal cups, which developed into a long series of geometric cups… which I never would have done had I lived somewhere else” (K. Price quoted in S. Barron and F.O. Gehry, eds., Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, Munich, 2012, p. 24). In homage to Mexican pottery and the desert landscape, Price created a group of handmade brightly colored non-serviceable slate cups. Untitled (Purple Slate Cup), 1972-1978, and Slate Cup II, 1972, have sharply intersecting geological planes, suggesting oceanside cliffs or homes overhanging water’s edge, as seen in architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Golden orange, adobe red and purple accentuate each plane of the cups. Glazing with glossy primary colors is also seen in Price’s architectural and geometric cups. Untitled (Geo. Cup), 1975, is a highly colored multipart cup, and Architectural Cup, 1974, is a detailed work on paper of a geometric cup with different colored planes, resembling abstract Bauhaus architecture. By the late 1980s, his vessels incorporated this geometry into organic shapes with a sculpture series of nebulous spherical sculptures that have a geometric hole in its center. Price noted: “I moved geometry to the inside of the piece and made outer forms more amorphous” (K. Price quoted in S. Barron and F.O. Gehry, eds., Ken Price Sculpture, p. 31). Untitled 'Price 90’, 1990, is an exquisite watercolor drawing of these inside/outside pieces that juxtaposes a purple geometric interior with a green biomorphic exterior. Price’s wide ranging cup series exquisitely combines high and low art, folk and fine art, pottery and ceramics.
In the early 1990s, Price moved from the desert back to LA where the urban city penetrated his work. His drawings no longer were preliminary experimentations or two dimensional counterparts for his ceramic vessels and sculptures, but had meanings and iconography of their own. Untitled (Interior), 1992, belongs to a series of representations of the urban landscape filled with smoke and pollution Price completed in this period. The watercolor and ink on paper work depicts a quiet interior, with two windows that look out onto a motel exterior, building and long palms. The uniform trees raise above the towering buildings in the distance, showing Price’s concern with the balance between nature and the city.
Price then returned to biomorphic abstract ceramic sculptures and striking use of color. Altoon, 2005, is a masterful example of his molten-like plump pieces with tightly coiled tendrils drooping down and rising up upon one another. The layered and erotic sloping curves and viscous forms resemble Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and the shapes of Surrealist Joan Miró. Executed in the artist’s final decade, which he called the ‘golden period’, Altoon’s iridescent surface was created with Price’s polished method of applying thin layers of vibrant acrylic paint atop one another, then sanding down areas to reveal the hidden colors, giving the sculpture a marbled and stippled appearance. Price’s bold color and forms simultaneously pay homage to the Abstract Expressionists and Modernist Sculptors, while throwing off tradition in a revolution to insert ceramics and the clay medium into the realm of high art.