Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Through Jan. 6

A single sculpture located in the first room of this show testifies to its creator’s virtuosity, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. “Made last year, the voluptuous linear form reclines horizontally like a Moorish odalisque by Matisse or a sybaritic bather in one of Ingres’s Turkish harem paintings.” Yet Zizi is “almost comic” at the same time—an amorphous, silvery green form that “looks something like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crossed with a banana split from the local Dairy Queen.” Ken Price, who died in February, at age 77, could achieve almost “cosmic” range with each work he created in painted ceramic. He was “one of the great sculptors of the last half-century,” and this retrospective, designed by Price’s friend Frank Gehry, is a tour de force.

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Few artists can top Price for sheer originality, said Tracey Harnish in HuffingtonPost.com. He created small pieces in fired clay at a time when other sculptors were going big using steel and found materials. His oozing, egg-shaped early pieces have an almost “alien sensuality”; clearly, Price was “fascinated by contradiction” and by “the push and pull of aversion and attraction.” Yet he really hit his stride late in life with a series of larger, biomorphic works “so sensual and ambiguous that they read androgynous while also suggesting the coiled snake of sexuality.” It’s a cliché to see the influence of California in the work of a California artist, but in one crucial aspect of Price’s work, that impulse feels appropriate: He was capable of “merging color and form to the point where they are indistinguishable,” much like the point where the Pacific meets the sky.