Kenneth Price

Forty-six years ago, Lucy Lippard remarked that “it is a fact rather than a value judgment that no one else, on the East or West coast, is working like Kenneth Price.” Indeed, this remained an apt assessment right up through the artist’s death on February 24 at the age of 77. As for value judgments, I would add without hesitation that Price’s ceramic space oddities are simply breathtaking and utterly sublime. Nine of them are on view in what began as a two-person show with Larry Bell—who also got his start at LA’s legendary Ferus Gallery in the 1960s—and has since switched over to be a solo display of Price’s sculptures and drawings. Four meteor-like vessels from the 1980s have unusually textured and colorful surfaces with striking cuts and suggestive hollows that directly echo forms found in the artist’s erotic drawings, some of which are also on view.

Yet it is the array of bulbous, knobby, undulating mounds from the past ten or so years that are especially thrilling. Painting each with multiple layers before sanding down their surfaces to excavate and expose buried chromatic strata, Price created a complex psychedelic-camouflage effect that wraps the rounded forms in a horror vacui skin of mottled opalescent color. Sculptures like Humpback, 1998, and Wide Load, 2004, sag, slouch, and droop in swollen folds like melting tongues, tummies, earlobes, and hemorrhoids. They are snot, slug, serpent, squid, scrotum, and surf.

It is wild that Price not only continued to be vital throughout the half century of his singular practice but seems to have outdone himself in recent years with increasingly impactful and strange objects—more of which will be revealed in the artist’s upcoming retrospective that opens in posthumous tribute at LACMA this September.