Biography

For over 50 years, Ken Price produced small-scale, brightly colored ceramic sculptures with exquisitely worked glazed and painted surfaces in which he achieved a balance between form and surface. In recent years, Price began making works in much larger sizes. His youthful experiences as a surfer in Los Angeles greatly influenced his art, which he explained as the manifestation of that which he found pleasurable. Price (1935-2012) had his first solo exhibition at the legendary Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1960, where he showed alongside other LA artists, including Wallace Berman and Ed Ruscha. The Menil Collection in Houston mounted a retrospective of Price's work in 1992, and in 2004 the Chinati Foundation, in Marfa, Texas, mounted a survey show of his work from the previous decade. In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized a major retrospective exhibition highlighting Price’s sculpture, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2013, The Drawing Center in New York organized the first survey of drawings by Price exhibiting sixty-five works on paper spanning fifty years. This exhibition traveled to the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico.