Modern and Contemporary Art

Note

Preeminent ceramicist and sculptor Ken Price belonged to the “Finish Fetish” school of Los Angeles artists in the 1960s that included Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston and Robert Irwin, a group that focused on slick surfaces and a polished quality in their work. While Price exhibited with the group at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, his pieces often straddled the line between art and craft, and were sometimes underappreciated at the time. Greatly influenced by his early teacher Peter Voulkos at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (later Otis College of Art and Design), Price learned from Voulkos's expressionistic, gestural approach, but subsequently created his own refined style.

For some time in the 1970s, Price worked exclusively on variations of the tea cup, influenced by Mexican terracotta works that abounded in nearby Baja and his ceramics studies in Japan. These experimentations led to a period in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the artist concentrated on small-scale, intensely worked pieces like Ha. Ha is a quintessential Price piece in its construction, a fired clay work with a multiplicity of thin layers of acrylic paint that the artist applied and sanded down to reveal a unique color pattern - a smooth, finished surface that belies its inner complexity.

Ken Price grew up in California near Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades and spent nearly every day surfing from the age of ten; the announcement card for his 1961 exhibition at Ferus Gallery even displayed a photo of the artist on his surfboard. While his most well-known works take on forms from the natural world - biomorphic blobs that undulate, pulse and fold in on themselves - Ha seems to reference the rolling waves of the California coastline, the dappled way the light catches the water as it crests and falls. Ha encapsulates the inherent anticipation and mystery of Price’s work, like the feelings one might have in the face of nature - the wonder and tension of what lies beneath or within the visible world is palpable here.