Beschreibung:

PROPERTY OF STEVEN KORFF AND MARCIA VAN WAGNER Ken Price Pink Egg 1964 glazed and painted ceramic, artist's painted wood pedestal Sculpture: 6 x 5 3/8 x 5 5/8 in. (15.2 x 13.7 x 14.3 cm) Pedestal: 59 5/8 x 12 x 12 in. (151.4 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm)
Provenance Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles Betty and Monte Factor, Beverly Hills, acquired from the above, 1964 Acquired by the present owner from the above through Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica, 2004 Exhibited Los Angeles, Ferus Gallery, An Exhibition of Sculpture by Kenneth Price from March 3, 1964 Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, The Betty and Monte Factor Family Collection, April 24-June 3, 1973 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, July 21-October 4, 1981, then traveled to San Antonio Museum of Art (November 20-January 31, 1982) Los Angeles, Olympic Arts Festival, Art in Clay: 1950's to 1980's in Southern California: Evolution, Revolution, Continuation, June 1-July 12, 1984, then traveled to Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (July 24-August 26, 1984) Paris, Le Centre Pompidou, Los Angeles 1955-1985 Birth Of An Art Capital, March 8-July 17, 2006 New York, Nyehaus and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, Ken Price: Sculpture and Drawings, February 25-March 27, 2010 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, September 16, 2012-January 6, 2013, then traveled to Texas, Nasher Sculpture Center (February 9-May 12, 2013), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (June 18-September 22, 2013) Literature Maurice Tuchman, ed., Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981, illustrated p. 50, cat. no. 98, p. 94, cat. no. 98 Betty Warner Sheinbaum, Art in Clay: 1950's to 1980's in Southern California : Evolution, Revolution, Continuation, exh. cat., Olympic Arts Festival, Los Angeles, 1984, illustrated p. 51, cat. no. 129 Catherine Grenier, ed., Los Angeles 1955-1985 Birth Of An Art Capital, exh. cat., Le Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006, illustrated p. 135, cat. no. 12 The Cool School: The Story of the Ferus Gallery - How LA Learned To Love Modern Art, DVD, Directed by Morgan Neville, Tremolo Productions, 2008 Kristen McKenna, The Ferus Gallery - A Place To Begin, 2009, illustrated p. 279 Ed Hardy: Tattoo The World, 2010, DVD, Directed by Emiko Omori, New Video Group, Inc., 2010 Mary Davis MacNaughton, ed., Clay's Tectonic Shift, 1956-1968: John Mason Ken Price, Peter Voulkos exh. cat., Ruth Chandler Williams Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, 2012, illustrated p. 118, cat. no. 37 Stephanie Barron, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012, illustrated pp. 137, 221 Catalogue Essay Pink Egg (1964), among the most iconic works of Ken Price’s long career, represents an important early transition for the artist as he embarked on an extended exploration into color, surface and form. His series of Egg sculptures, vivid personalities elevated on pedestals, rose up from the artist’s subdued Mounds of the late 1950s and signaled the arrival of a fearsome new talent, independent and daring. Price’s ceramic sculptures are formally characterized by his treatment of color and by the unsettling forms that might more often be described as organic if they were not so alien. Price’s Eggs from this period are noted for a shocking characteristic: orifices open onto dark depths revealing amoeba-like forms that threaten to protrude—and sometimes they do. On the topic of viewer’s reaction to the Eggs, Price recounted: “People would come and tell me that they were repulsed and fascinated…like looking at a bad automobile accident or something, that you can’t take your eyes off, you know what I mean? With the eggs, I got that response from a lot of people, that they really didn’t like them, but there was something about them that made them keep coming back for another look.” (Michele D. De Angelus, interview with Ken Price, 1980, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, p. 33) Have we seen these shapes before? The Eggs in particular invite critics to draw comparisons with other artists enamored of this universal form. In her catalogue essay for a 1966 LACMA exhibition, Lucy Lippard