Ken Price (1935-2012)
Lot 569

Ken Price (1935-2012)

Peacock

Closed14 May 2014

Price Realised

USD 185,000

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Ken Price (1935-2012)
Peacock
acrylic on fired clay
12 x 16 x 15 in. (30.5 x 40.6 x 38.1 cm.)
Executed in 1988.

Greenberg Gallery, St, Louis
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Specialist note

As Satre has remarked 'Color is a man smiling, modeling, man in tears.' Price's work invokes to a remarkable degree a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous.... whether he uses red, blue or green on any particular form is of little consequence. Yet Price introduces color with such an acute choice it seems almost to shape the form. He does not follow any historical lines of logic such as in folk art or advertising art, but goes back into the deepest and most buried parts of the human psyche in much the same way Brancusi did, to reinvent form. Price is practically inventing color itself at this deep and most basic of levels.
-J. Coplans, "The Sculpture of Kenneth Price," Art International, March, 20, 1964, p. 33.