Inez

Date: 2010
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/2014/2014.12.13_1a.jpg&max=460 width="334" height="309" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=86756"]] || Title: **Inez**

Artist: **Ken Price** Born: Los Angeles, California 1935 Died: Taos, New Mexico 2012

Medium: fired and painted ceramic Dimensions: 7 x 8 x 7 3/4 in. (17.8 x 20.3 x 19.7 cm) (irreg.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the James F. Dicke Family © 2010, Ken Price, Inc.

Accession: 2014.12.13 || //Inez// is an example of Ken Price’s late career ceramic sculptures. Described as lumpy with valleys and dips, after the mid-1990s he transitioned to pieces with more rounded corners and visible under colors. Price applied alcohol or sanded the piece to uncover the under layers of brightly-colored paint. This process to an extent recalls nineteenth-century Japanese lacquerware created in the wakasa nuri technique, which results in a piece with a mottled appearance.
 * About the Artwork: **

Price layered acrylic paint to create a mottled sculpture. Each color he applied in five coats, then the artist painted five coats of the next color. Sometimes Price used up to fifteen colors for a total of seventy-five layers. His late works like //Inez// are abstract forms evocative of primitive life, sensuality, sea creatures, snakes, waves, and oozing mud. In addition, Price’s sculptures resemble the works of such early twentieth-century artists as Brancusi and Henry Moore. Most of Price’s sculptures are small scale. However, during the last few years of his life he began working on a large sculpture.

The name "Inez" is a variation of the Greek-derived name "Agnes," which means pure, holy, chaste, or sacred. Although it is not clear if the entomology of the name has any particular connection to Price’s piece.

Ken Price is one of the most important sculptors to have emerged in Los Angeles in the past 50 years. Born in Los Angeles in 1935, Price grew up near the beach and spent his adolescence surfing nearly every day. The son and grandson of inventors, he was raised in an environment that encouraged his creative interests, leading Price to identify as an artist from an early age.
 * About the Artist: **

Price received a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California in 1956 and studied briefly with Peter Voulkos at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) before receiving an M.F.A. from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred in 1959. Returning to Los Angeles, Price joined the stable of artists at the legendary Ferus Gallery, quickly establishing himself with several successful solo exhibitions. As Peter Schjeldahl noted in an article for the //New Yorker//, Price's development as an artist has always been on his own terms:

// Price emerged in the 1960s as the brilliantly contrary student of Peter Voulkos…Price eschewed Voulkos's virile expansiveness to work small, making exquisite egg shapes that sprout erotic, worrisome tendrils. He proceeded to develop abstract variations on cup, teapot, and vase forms with faceted asymmetrical compositions, glazed with primary colors, that are like pocket distillations—which turn monumental in memory—of modern style from cubism through De Stijl to minimalism. //

Price also steadfastly refused to illuminate the meaning of his work, preferring instead to allow the art to speak for itself. At a talk he gave in 2005 at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Price was quoted saying, “I can't prove my art's any good or that it means what I say it means. And nothing I say can improve the way it looks."

Price’s meticulous approach to object-making and his penchant for vibrant colors and unorthodox application methods marks him as a seminal Los Angeles artist, alongside Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman.

First recognized in the early 1960s for his series of Eggs, described by Roberta Smith for the //New York Times// as “intensely colored ovoids punctuated with small openings from which slimy-looking forms might protrude, suggesting fingers, phalluses, worms or perhaps entrails,” his subsequent work demonstrated both diversity of style and fidelity to his artistic principles.

Although Price’s work may not adhere to the common stereotypes held about modern sculpture—that it should be large-scale, industrial and muted in color—his artwork nevertheless occupies an important place in art history. Peter Plagens, writing for the Wall Street Journal, illustrated Price’s distinction when he wrote, “the art of Ken Price is a lively link between the austerity of Minimalism (he never wasted a curve or a color) and the inclusiveness of postmodernism (his work can remind you of everything from Constantin Brancusi to American Indians to Japanese woodblocks), proving that in art there are no real ruptures, only intriguingly disguised continuities.”

Ken Price died on February 24, 2012, at his home in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, just outside of Taos. He has exhibited widely and has work in many public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Ken Price was featured in several Getty-sponsored “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions in 2011-2012. At the time of his death, Price was working on a 50-year retrospective of his work for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Barron, Stephanie. //Ken Price: Sculpture A Retrospective// (New York: Prestel, 2012), 31-36.

Ken Price bio: @http://www.franklloyd.com/dynamic/artist_bio.asp?ArtistID=41

Lebow, Edward. //The Ceramics of Ken Price// (Texas: Menil Foundation, 1992).

//Ken Price//. Contributions by Vija Celmins and Ken Price, Matthew Higgs (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2007).

//Ken Price: The Large Sculptures//. With an essay by Alex Kitnick (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2014).


 * Resources: **

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page Wakasa Nuri Lacquerware
 * Links: **