Zizi

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Zizi

United States, 2011
Sculpture
Fired and painted clay
16 1/2 x 24 x 17 in. (41.91 x 60.96 x 43.18 cm)
Purchased with funds provided by the Modern and Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund and gift of Matthew Marks (M.2011.96)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

Sculptor Ken Price, whose sensuous and fluid works have in recent years commanded great critical interest, began his career in the late 1950s when he was included in the original stable of artists at ...
Sculptor Ken Price, whose sensuous and fluid works have in recent years commanded great critical interest, began his career in the late 1950s when he was included in the original stable of artists at the Ferus Gallery, along with celebrated Californian artists such as Ed Ruscha, John Altoon, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Larry Bell, and Billy Al Bengston, with whom he shared a studio for some time. Among the artists who chose clay as their principle medium, Price emerged as heir apparent to Peter Voulkos, one of Price’s early teachers at the Otis Art Institute and a forerunner of the movement to catapult clay out of the traditionally assigned roles of functional objects and decorative arts. Price’s astonishing body of work, long admired by artists, collectors, and museums, has attracted a cult following among critics and scholars since the 1960s, with champions including John Coplans, Walter Hopps, and Lucy Lippard, who wrote in 1966, “It is a fact rather than a value judgment that no one else, on the east or west coast, is working like Kenneth Price,” as well as later critics such as Peter Schjeldahl, Christopher Knight, Dave Hickey, Roberta Smith, and Nick Stillman. In the early 1970s Price moved with his family to Taos, New Mexico where the predominant Mexican folk aesthetic inspired the artist to embark on the six-year project titled Happy Curios (one of which is in LACMA’s collection). The Curios were seen in their totality in 1978 at LACMA in the exhibition “Ken Price: Happy’s Curios,” organized by Maurice Tuchman, whom Stephanie Barron assisted on the project. Walter Hopps organized Price’s first retrospective in 1992 at the Menil Collection in Houston and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Beginning in 1993, Price worked as a faculty member in the Fine Arts department at the University of Southern California (USC), where he remained for a decade. This year, the University conferred upon him the prestigious USC Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award. Alongside these major accomplishments and throughout the remainder of his career, Price’s sculptures took on fluid, rhythmic and contoured forms where he employed a unique process of painting. As exemplified by Zizi, the work’s surface is composed of roughly seventy layers of acrylic paint that he painstakingly sands, each stratum uncovered as he varies the pressure of his sanding. The result is a lyrical composition of colors held mystically together in a speckled and layered arrangement that is unmistakably anthropomorphic. Suggestively, subtly erotic and molten‑like slumps, these haunting, intimate sculptures occupy a unique place in American sculpture. Price’s sculpture has been in several group exhibitions including the 1979 and 1981 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; “Sunshine and Noir: Art in Los Angeles, 1960‑1997” (1997) organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; “Made in California: Art, Image, Identity,” 1900‑2000 (2000) at he LACMA; and “Los Angeles, 1955‑85” (2006) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris as well as several exhibitions connected with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time (2011). His work is in the permanent collections of a multitude of major museum collections, such as LACMA, the Walker Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In September 2012, LACMA will be presenting in the Resnick Pavilion the exhibition “Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective,” which will travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Stephanie Barron saw Zizi, one of Price’s most recent works, during a recent visit to his Taos studio in May to review plans for the upcoming retrospective and make final selections for the exhibition. Matthew Marks Gallery, which represents Price, has agreed to forgo their commission in order to offer this work to the museum at an unprecedented 50% discount. Never seen outside the studio, Zizi represents the pinnacle of his incredibly unique and prolific sixty-year career. LACMA currently owns several earlier works; however, the museum does not own any works after 1997. Given the artist’s precarious health, Zizi, which Price believes is the best of his newest work, belongs to the last major series of his career. (Lauren Bergman, Assistant Curator Modern Art)
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Bibliography

  • Eliel, Carol, editor. Light, Space, Surface: Art from Southern California. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: DelMonico Books, 2021.
  • Barron, Stephanie and Lauren Bergman.  Ken Price Sculpture: a Retrospective. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico, 2012.
  • Eliel, Carol, editor. Light, Space, Surface: Art from Southern California. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: DelMonico Books, 2021.
  • Barron, Stephanie and Lauren Bergman.  Ken Price Sculpture: a Retrospective. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico, 2012.
  • Barron, Stephanie. Acknowledgments, or Every Label Tells a Story. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues: LACMA, 2017.
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