Adler Beatty is pleased to announce In the Flesh, curated by Lily Mortimer and Alexander Adler featuring drawings by Ken Price from the collection of Dagny Janss Corcoran and works by John Altoon, Lorenzo Amos, Nobuyoshi Araki, Alvaro Barrington, Louise Bonnet, Gabriel Cohen, Ella DVG, Alejandro Gehry, Georgia Gardner Gray, Ray Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Keita Morimoto, Anna Park, David Rappeneau, Torbjørn Rødland, Félicien Rops, Thomas Ruff, Ed Ruscha, Egon Schiele, Danny Sobor, Hannah Taurins, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kara Walker, Tom Wesselmann, Anna Weyant, Robin Williams, Chloe Wise, and Lisa Yuskavage.
The gallery will host an opening on Thursday, September 18th, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at 34 East 69th Street.
So I found that hunger was a way
of persons outside windows
that entering takes away—
Emily Dickinson “I Had Been Hungry”
From his first solo exhibition at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery in 1960, Ken Price (1935–2012) brought a noir eccentricity to his lifelong exploration of pleasure and form. Everywhere, eroticism is smuggled in. Take his early ceramic cups from the 1960s, with their phallic and mammary forms, the sensuousness of their openings and handholds. Or his voluptuous, biomorphic sculptures, which evoke endless libidinal descriptions of fleshiness, mounds, organs, cavities, and voids. (Critic Nick Stillman once wrote of the “baseness implicit in their shape.”) And then the works on paper created throughout five decades, haunted and ecstatic, where the surreal features of alternate landscapes gush, erupt, writhe, and undulate. In so many of these scenes, looming shadows imply secrets and underbellies.
—Annie Godfrey Larmon
Please find the full essay attached