the otherworldly forms of ken price’s solo exhibition at PoMo in norway
By annalise kamegawa I designboom
At PoMo, the museum for contemporary and modern art in Trondheim, Norway, the solo show for Ken Price, Alien Terrain (2026), fills its halls with the late American artist’s experimental ceramic sculptures. The space’s interior is almost completely white—it aesthetically unifies the ornate Ionic columns, the exhibition plinths and the arched windows. When Price’s works, globules of ceramic that bulge and stack in a fantastic mix of colors, are arranged within the space, they evoke an otherworldly quality that encapsulates the particular methodology he brought to the medium.
Ken Price – Alien Terrain, PoMo, Trondheim, 2026 | all installation view photography by Uli Holz / PoMo, Trondheim © Estate of Ken Price
The juxtaposition is ripe for comparisons to surrealist sci-fi cinema, in which the ancient comes into contact with the contemporary. It recalls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973). Price’s Cheeks (1998), created with fired and painted clay, shows his peculiar attention to form. The work at PoMo is fashioned out of smoothly undulating wrinkles and bumps. With its speckled finish, which appears peachy pink at a distance, it comes together to resemble a certain fleshiness. It recalls something alien-like, with cavities that look like a navel or the swirling entrance to an uncanny ear. Storytelling feels like a natural next step from this work, as it sits on the boundary of what is real, begging the question: where did this come from?
It feels as though his pieces could have emerged from another planet. In Crookton (2006), thick silvery puddles stack on top of each other, recalling rolls of fat on a chubby creature or some foreign goop collecting like a stalagmite in an alien cave. Walking around the piece, new gyri and sulci emerge, giving an insight into the mind of the artist. By leveraging the flexibility of ceramic and subverting expectations of the form, Price fashions objects that challenge the notion of what the medium could be.
The piece Chicton (2009) is one of the clearest displays of Price’s technique. Looking at its smooth finish, ringed dots of color repeat themselves in different sizes across the surface of the sculpture. To achieve this, the artist laid layers of different paints before sanding them down to reveal the strata underneath, creating a dynamic rhythm of spots that gives a life-like texture to his works.
This article was originally published by Designboom.