Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Ken Price: Primal, Physical, Sensual, 50 Years of Sculpture and Drawings the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. Spanning the artist’s entire career, the exhibition includes thirty sculptures and drawings from the artist’s estate, many of which are exhibited here for the first time.

Early in his career, Price made a series of innovative ceramic cups, often adorned with snails or frogs, or emerging from rock-like bases. The title of the exhibition is taken from a statement Price made about this work that speaks to the most fundamental aspects of his influential, five-decade-long career: “I just like the cup. I think it’s a real kind of primal idiom. When you use a cup, it’s right in your hand, and you actually put it to your mouth and drink warm liquid from it. That is very primal, physical, and sensual, and is representative of sensual life.”

Price found a powerful source of inspiration in nature, from the erupting volcanoes seen in his frequent travels to Hawaii, to the spectacular desert landscapes of his home in Taos, New Mexico. Beginning with the cups in the 1960s, then the specimen rocks of the 1980s, and finally the later, biomorphic sculptures for which he is best known, the exhibition highlights how Price synthesized these forms together with everyday objects and the human body. The sculptures and drawings on view, “seduce and enlighten,” as the critic Roberta Smith has written of his work.

Ken Price (1935–2012) was born in Los Angeles. He had his first one-person exhibition at the now legendary Ferus Gallery in 1960. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Menil Collection in Houston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In 2012, shortly before his untimely passing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a retrospective of his work, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The following year, the Drawing Center in New York, in collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, organized the first survey of Price’s works on paper.

Ken Price: Primal, Physical, Sensual, 50 Years of Sculpture and Drawings is on view at 523 West 24th Street from September 5 to October 25, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For additional information please call 212-243-0200 or email inquiries@matthewmarks.com.

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