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Review published in the
NEW YORK TIMES
December 11, 1998
by Roberta Smith
The Los Angeles artist Ken Price deserves to be better known for the small, suggestive glazed or painted ceramic sculptures that he has been perfecting for nearly 40 years. Maybe his latest efforts, among his most perfect yet, will do the trick.
They sum up many longtime interests, beginning with his intensely colored, abstractly erotic egg sculptures of the early 1960's and continuing with various excursions into cupdom, natural form, popular culture and early modernism. And they tap Mr. Price as an artist of the 90's, precursor to biomorphic abstractionists from Charles Long (who began in ceramics himself) to the Los Angeles painter Monique Prieto.
Defined by actoplasmic bulges, curves, swells and slurps, the new Prices simultaneously evoke Flubber, Chinese scholars' rocks, Henry Moore, baseball mitts, Favrile glass and the most exquisite razor burn imaginable. The sexy black holes of the early egg sculptures are back, but as seductive, all-purpose orifices that set the surrounding from in rippling, bivalvular motion.
As for the razor burn, Mr. Price's stunning surfaces turn the elastic forms cosmic. They result from a painstaking process of sanding through numerous layers of thin paint - four or five jewel-like colors in repeating sequences - to create thousands of tiny, pore like dots.
The largely light blue "Flump," for example, progresses through dark blue, red, pink and lavender before beginning again. From a distance, each piece seems nearly monochromatic, with a second color seemingly dusted on or flaking off. Up close the eye can get lost in space. The dots, which are really concentric rings of layered color, read as tiny gems, islands or planets.
Not many artists start out good, get better and remain pertinent. Stuart Davis and Philip Guston are among the few, and so is Mr. Price.
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