KEN PRICE | Lowly

LA Louver, Venice
Acquired from the above by the present owner in October 2006

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. The surface is clean and smooth. The colors are bright, fresh and clean. There are no apparent condition issues with this work.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Sensual, voluptuous, enchanting and other-worldly, Ken Price's Lowly is an exceptional example of the artist's late sculptures and demonstrates his complete mastery and advancement of the centuries-old tradition of ceramics. For nearly 60 years, Price worked within the precarious intersection of craft and fine art. Though often compared to his mentor, pioneering West Coast ceramicist Peter Voulkos, or other American post-war artists such as Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, H.C. Westermann and Larry Bell, it is clear that Price forged his own path, championing form, surface, scale and, above all, color. Each decade brought about a new stylistic direction for Price's sculptures, and with each one, Price revolutionized the application of color to a surface in unexpected yet intimate and glorious ways.  Executed in 2004, Lowly is kaleidoscopic in both color and form and its bulbous, undulating body appears to have been generously poured from above by chance rather than painstakingly molded by hand. In describing Price's labor-intensive painting practice, Stephanie Barron writes: "Each color is applied in five coats before the next one is added, and a given sculpture might embody as many as fifteen different colors—a total of seventy-five layers of thin acrylic paint. Black is always the first layer, as it creates the dark defining circles that surround small areas of color" (Stephanie Barron, "Lumps, Bumps, Grooves and Curves: Fifty Years of Ken Price Sculpture" in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, 2012, p. 34). The final monochromatic surface is then meticulously sanded down to reveal glimpses of the vibrant underlying layers "like a pointillist painting or even a Chuck Close canvas" that achieves the visual sensation of depth and complexity on a perfectly smooth surface (Ibid., p. 35). This process is evident in Lowly: the sky-blue shell glows with speckled, granular hints of cherry red, electric pinks, neon greens and deep-sea blues. A summation of Ken Price's entire body of work, Lowly appears to be a celestial nebula or molten lava rock that straddles the boundaries between stiff and malleable, inanimate and alive.