McKenzie Fine Art: Ursula Morley Price 2022 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467 fax 212 989 5642

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	Ursula Morley Price: New Ceramics January 7 - February 20, 2022
	Ursula Morley Price commences her stoneware sculptures using a traditional pinch-and-coil method to create a central vessel form in the shape of a bottle, bowl, or vase. Her signature flanges, pinched to an almost paper fineness, are also made from coils and are applied to the central armature in even rows running vertically or swirling around the body of the vessel. The flanges are usually tightly spaced, and their edges have a variety of articulation, variously straight, pinched, or scalloped. Price glazes her work monochromatically, in either rich dark browns or a range of lighter white tones, all with a distinctive matte texture. In lighter-colored forms, the edges of the flanges are sometimes articulated by a darker-toned glaze. A notable work in the exhibition is a brown vase form with scalloped flanges that arc dramatically upward and downward as they travel around the rim of the form, appearing to multiply and expand outward from its base. In another light-colored vase form with a curving body, wide flanges open outward like water spraying or a bird revealing its wings. In still another, tightly spaced flanges travel straight up the form, moving energetically away from the opening in large, scalloped-edge arcs. Half of the works in the show are bottle shapes, each with a distinctively narrow neck and opening, a form common in Price’s previous work. These range in scale from 9 to 16-½ inches in height, and their variety of shapes, from a large and disc-like form to a tall and narrow bottle with a wide base, to a smaller, top-heavy shape, reference not only classical sculptural forms but are also suggestive of the gamut of female body types. Price, now 85 years old, was born in London and has been living in a small village in the Charentes region of southwestern France since 1973. She has been exhibiting internationally for nearly fifty years. Her ceramics are found in numerous public collections, such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design, as well as many others across the United States. Her work is in the collection of the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Musée National de Céramique in Sèvres, France, as well as museums in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom. In 2013 the Musée d’Art Moderne de Troyes in France mounted a career retrospective exhibition of Ursula Morley Price’s sculptures. Currently her work is on view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, in the group exhibition Les Flammes: L’Age de la céramique.