If you haven’t been keeping up with all the great press surrounding “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective” at LACMA, here’s a compendium for your reading pleasure:
1) Edward Goldman, “Ken Price: Sculptor at LACMA," KCRW Art Talk
rice himself was excited about his later work and even during the last years of his life, after retiring to his Taos, New Mexico studio while fighting cancer, he called it his "golden period.” “I have the technical facility to accommodate ideas right away. I used to call it the highway to the unconscious. And that’s where I like to be, in that place where you’re open, your mind goes quiet, and before long all kinds of possibilities come.”
_____________________________________________________________
2) Brian Boucher, “Ken Price Remembered at LACMA,” Art in America
This article provided an overview of the opening reception for the exhibition, where close friends and family of Ken Price shared their sentiments. Of the most moving, were the following remarks from Ken’s son, Jackson Price:
“I got to work for my father for 20 years,” he said. “There wasn’t a day that passed that I wasn’t convinced I was working for the greatest genius on earth.”
The main lesson he learned, he said, was that “Life can be unbelievably beautiful.”
_____________________________________________________________
Price was influenced by the nature surrounding him throughout his life and by abstracting and mutating shape, pattern, and structure; he produced luminescent sculptures that enlighten the mortal plane, like any mad genius would.
_____________________________________________________________
4) “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” ArtDaily.org
“For more than fifty years, Los Angeles artist Ken Price made remarkable and innovative works that have challenged contemporary sculptural practice,” says Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art and curator of the exhibition. “It is only through assembling the entire range of his sculpture on the occasion of this retrospective (it has been twenty years since the last one), that we can see the essential unity of his sculptural practice — the connections that exist among different periods and styles.
_____________________________________________________________
Images top to bottom - Ken Price, Zizi, 2011; Installation view, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art via Art In America; Ken Price, L. Blue, 1961; Installation view, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
All images © Ken Price. Photo © Fredrik Nilsen