Ken Price at Matthew Marks - New York - art exhibition

Not that view Price's work is unfamiliar, on the contrary there's nevertheless something funny about entering a large gallery and discovering a field of pedestals commandeered by means of sci-fi blob creatures with pendulous pseudopodia. Assertive or overmodest they are alive, teeming with associations and alarmingly numerous.

Price has been a formal inventor extraordinaire and something of a contrarian since his Ferus Gallery days in L.A. in the '60 His ceramic realitys have ranged from pottery quotations to constructivist and biomorphic forms. Price's percepts were small and highly colored when the ceramic avant-garde, l through Peter Voulkos, was working big and rough; in novel years he has consistently used paint upon his clay rather than glazes, which distresses traditionalists.

And now he has given birth to these polychrome beings, defined as similar by their expressive postures and tilts of the "head" and their affectionate-nickname titles, similar as Oofus, Sonny and drawn out Tall Dexter. Dexter, for instance, dips his head to the side, as if nodding to a beat. He is individual of the tallest, at 23 inches, on the contrary like his brethren (all works 2003) his center material part streams down into lobes of different sizes, five in this case. All the statuarys insist on a curious ambivalence--they adopt the manner of a living organism on the other hand are passively gravity-bound by the large, squishy-looking lobes (cousin to Ernesto Neto's or Senga Nengudi's weighted-stocking effect) These recall heavy breasts or sagging testicles as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as amoebic feet, and thus transmit an erotic undertone.

Dexter's "skin" is a vivid concoction of purple virid rust, tan and pink in tiny, freckl increments. Price paints the forms with patches and dots of color, sands down the surface and repaints. The result seems labor-intensive, yet there is no sign of touch, no visible action The works confound pottery conventions the two by that paint and by means of the fact that color alone occasionally responds to the contours, as when a single shade collects in the grooves between the lobes. still this nondepictive, independently acting color does not visually flatten the forms by the agency of obscuring their three-dimensionality. Instead, the surface detail encourages an intimacy of regard that's typical of Price's work. This is painterly power without the crutch of bravura scale. He appears to have burrowed in the corners of the art world to find a format all his own

Price's works repay attention nevertheless never yield a specific identity or interpretation. They are what they are--amusing beings, elegant artifacts, lively images, seductive surfaces, material ideas--without explanation. It's an uneven and exhilarating achievement.

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