Ken Price at Matthew Marks - New York - art exhibition

Not that Ken Price's work is unfamiliar, but there's nevertheless something funny about entering a large gallery and discovering a field of pedestals commandeered by sci-fi blob creatures with pendulous pseudopodia. Assertive or demure, they are alive, teeming with associations and alarmingly numerous.

Price has been a formal inventor extraordinaire and something of a contrarian since his Ferus Gallery days in L.A. in the '60s. His ceramic objects have ranged from pottery quotations to constructivist and biomorphic forms. Price's objects were small and highly colored when the ceramic avant-garde, led by Peter Voulkos, was working big and rough; in recent years he has consistently used paint on his clay rather than glazes, which distresses traditionalists.

And now he has given birth to these polychrome beings, defined as such by their expressive postures and tilts of the "head" and their affectionate-nickname titles, such as Oofus, Sonny and Long Tall Dexter. Dexter, for instance, dips his head to the side, as if nodding to a beat. He is one of the tallest, at 23 inches, but, like his brethren (all works 2003), his centered body streams down into lobes of different sizes, five in this case. All the sculptures insist on a curious ambivalence--they adopt the manner of a living organism but are passively gravity-bound by the large, squishy-looking lobes (cousin to Ernesto Neto's or Senga Nengudi's weighted-stocking effect). These recall heavy breasts or sagging testicles as much as amoebic feet, and thus convey an erotic undertone.

Dexter's "skin" is a vivid concoction of purple, green, rust, tan and pink in tiny, freckled increments. Price paints the forms with patches and dots of color, sands down the surface and repaints. The effect seems labor-intensive, yet there is no sign of touch, no visible gesture. The works confound pottery conventions both by that paint and by the fact that color only occasionally responds to the contours, as when a single hue collects in the grooves between the lobes. Yet this nondepictive, independently acting color does not visually flatten the forms by obscuring their three-dimensionality. Instead, the surface detail encourages an intimacy of regard that's typical of Price's work. This is painterly power without the crutch of bravura scale. He seems to have burrowed in the corners of the art world to find a format all his own.

Price's works repay attention yet never yield a specific identity or interpretation. They are what they are--amusing beings, elegant artifacts, lively images, seductive surfaces, material ideas--without explanation. It's an odd and exhilarating achievement.

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