bandtide.pages.dev

Ken price ceramics for sale

    •

Ken Price

From the 1950s onwards, Ken Price committed to clay as a material and was a key figure in the rising Los Angeles art scene. His small-scale brightly coloured ceramic sculptures have been equally inspired by ancient Mexican earthenware, traditional folk pottery and the Bauhaus fusion of crafts and fine arts. Developing high craftsmanship, he handmade very different series of abstract and biomorphic forms imbued with suggestive associations. In the 1970s, he moved to Taos in New Mexico where he produced the ambitious series called Happy’s Curios that includes various display devices like ‘death shrines’ and ‘town units’. He spent the 1980s in Massachusetts, and moved back to Los Angeles and New Mexico in 1992. Price often fired his sculptural objects (sometimes functional vessels) unglazed, which he then painted with multiple, thin layers of colour. These were often sanded to produce a variegated effect. He also worked as a printmaker.

Ken Price (b. 1935, Los Angeles, CA; d. 2012, Taos, NM, USA) participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1979 and 1981. His first retros

    •
Ken Price is one of the most important sculptors to have emerged in Los Angeles in the past 50 years. Born in Los Angeles in 1935, Price grew up near the beach and spent his adolescence surfing nearly every day. The son and grandson of inventors, he was raised in an environment that encouraged his creative interests, leading Price to identify as an artist from an early age.

Price received a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California in 1956 and studied briefly with Peter Voulkos at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) before receiving an M.F.A. from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred in 1959. Returning to Los Angeles, Price joined the stable of artists at the legendary Ferus Gallery, quickly establishing himself with several successful solo exhibitions.

As Peter Schjeldahl noted in an article for the New Yorker, Price's development as an artist has always been on his own terms:

Price emerged in the 1960s as the brilliantly contrary student of Peter Voulkos…Price eschewed Voulkos's virile expansiveness to work
    •

Ken Price

Artist

born Los Angeles, CA 1935-died Taos, NM 2012

Biography

Ken Price studied at the Chouinard and Otis Art Institutes in Los Angeles, before earning his BFA from the University of Southern California in 1956 and an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Price was greatly influenced by the progressive ceramist Peter Voulkos, who taught him at Otis. The pair bridged the gap between “fine art” and “craft” through their unprecedented application of contemporary styles to the medium of ceramics. An avid surfer, Price was influenced by the ocean and by the Mexican pottery he saw while on surfing trips in Southern California. Price’s works became larger, more sensual, and increasingly abstract as his career progressed. Throughout his life, he adamantly refused to provide any explanation of the meaning behind his works, instead insisting that viewers discover their own meaning in his complex, abstract forms.

Copyright ©bandtide.pages.dev 2025