Ken Price

Ken Price was an American ceramic artist associated with the circle of West Coast artists around the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, a group that helped push clay from craft into contemporary fine art. Rejecting the traditional vessel and functional pottery forms that had dominated American ceramics, Price made small, densely worked, biomorphic sculptures finished in vivid, hand applied color that seemed to strain against the material's own limits. His forms evolved over decades from tightly controlled, egg like shapes to looser, more organic and cartoonish sculptures later in his career, always retaining a close attention to color and surface. Price is widely credited, alongside contemporaries such as Peter Voulkos, with establishing ceramic sculpture as a serious and independent branch of American contemporary art.