Ken Price, Alien Terrain, Trondheim, Norway by PoMo

PoMo has opened Alien Terrain, an exhibition dedicated to the American artist Ken Price, in the Post Hall on the museum's ground floor. Price, born in Los Angeles in 1935 and based later in Taos, New Mexico until his death in 2012, spent five decades reworking what ceramics could be within contemporary art. This is his first solo presentation in Norway, running from 25th June 2026 through 3rd January 2027.

The show gathers 14 sculptures from Price's late period, made between 1995 and 2011. The forms sit somewhere between the bodily and the geological, with rounded and perforated surfaces that read as eroded by wind or time, occasionally recalling lunar fragments or terrain from an imagined planet. Early pieces in the group, including Miroesque, Cheeks, and Kabongy Balls, carry this landscape quality most directly, their surfaces built up in gently undulating layers.

Price's surface treatment is central to how these pieces sit in the room. Built through repeated layers of paint, sanding, and polishing, the finish reads as glossy and almost synthetic, closer to the smooth vibrancy of comics or illustrated science fiction than to traditional ceramic glazing. Placed on plinths within the Post Hall, the sculptures hold their own against the room's scale, their saturated color and dense, rounded volumes standing apart from the surrounding architecture.

Later works in the exhibition, among them Zyko, Chicton and Crypto, move toward more complex, twisting forms, as though caught mid-transformation. Two bronze sculptures, Spider Blue and Yogi, extend the same visual language into a larger scale, yet within the hall, they read as continuous with the smaller ceramic works rather than separate from them.

Alien Terrain is produced by PoMo in collaboration with the Ken Price Estate and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Details:

Exhibition: Ken Price, Alien Terrain

Typology: Museum exhibition

Venue: PoMo, Post Hall (ground floor)

Location: Trondheim, Norway

Dates: 25th June 2026 – 3rd January 2027

Artist: Ken Price (b. 1935, Los Angeles, California; d. 2012, Taos, New Mexico)

Number of works: 14 sculptures, from Price's late period (1995–2011)

Organized by: PoMo, in collaboration with the Ken Price Estate and Matthew Marks Gallery