Lisson Gallery, in collaboration with Matthew Marks Gallery, is set to present a major exhibition dedicated to the late American artist Ken Price—marking the first solo presentation of his work in the UK in nearly a decade.
Bringing together sculpture and drawing, several of which will be shown in London for the first time, the exhibition offers a timely opportunity to revisit one of the most inventive and singular voices in postwar American art.
Best known for radically expanding the possibilities of ceramics, Price spent five decades pushing clay far beyond its conventional associations. His sculptures—often intimate in scale but monumental in presence—occupy a territory between abstraction and figuration, balancing sensuality, humour and an unmistakably bodily physicality. Fluid, biomorphic and frequently suggestive, works such as Prone (1997), Itself (2003), Yin (2009) and Amazon (2003) reveal the artist’s extraordinary ability to transform fired and painted clay into luminous, almost hallucinatory forms.
What makes Price’s work so compelling is its surface. Through painstaking processes of layering pigment and sanding back colour, he created richly atmospheric skins that seem to glow from within—objects that feel simultaneously earthy and otherworldly, tactile yet elusive.
Born in Los Angeles in 1935, Price emerged as a defining figure in the Southern California art scene of the 1960s. His practice was shaped by a rich cross-current of influences—from Mexican pottery traditions and jazz improvisation to Pop culture, desert landscapes and the shifting architecture of Los Angeles itself. Following his debut solo exhibition at Ferus Gallery in 1960 at just 25 years old, Price quickly became recognised as a major artistic force, appearing on the cover of Artforum in 1963 before major institutional exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Menil Collection and Walker Art Center.
The Lisson exhibition also highlights Price’s extraordinary works on paper—an often overlooked but vital part of his practice. Drawings such as 100 Foot Sculpture in Isolation (2007), Nature Study (2007) and Two Hermits (2006) reveal how sculptural thinking extended naturally into line, colour and composition. Dreamlike landscapes populated by erupting volcanoes, swirling skies and impossible geological formations suggest an artist building an entire imaginative world—part desert mythology, part cosmic cartoon, part psychological landscape.
Price once said:
“For me drawing is really flexible, and I use it in different ways. It’s my way of developing ideas.”
That sense of freedom runs throughout his practice. Whether in clay, bronze, pigment or paper, Ken Price’s work remains unmistakably his own—playful, seductive, deeply tactile and endlessly inventive.
This London exhibition offers a rare chance to experience the full breadth of that vision, reaffirming Price’s place as one of the most original sculptors of the late 20th century.
Ken Price, 1st May – 25th July 2026, Lisson Gallery London
Opening: Thursday, 30th April 6PM – 8PM
