Ken Price Drawings

"Ken Price: Drawings" is the catalogue for a 2016 Matthew Marks Gallery exhibition devoted entirely to Price's drawings, work long overshadowed by the ceramic sculpture he is best known for.

The 108-page paperback reproduces Price's works on paper - loose, often erotic or biomorphic studies that run parallel to the biomorphic forms and hallucinatory color of his glazed ceramic sculptures - with an essay by critic and curator Jean-Pierre Criqui situating the drawings within his larger practice. First published in 2016, the book was reissued in a second, hardcover edition in 2019.

Price (1935-2012) trained at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and studied with Peter Voulkos, and spent five decades pushing ceramic sculpture toward biomorphic, brightly glazed forms that blurred the line between craft and fine art, exhibiting internationally and eventually earning a 2012 retrospective at LACMA that traveled to the Met. His drawing practice, private for most of his career, surfaces here as a direct record of the same restless, organic vocabulary that runs through the sculpture.