ken price's otherworldly ceramic sculptures turn norway's PoMo museum into an alien terrain

Alien Terrain IN Trondheim, Norway

At PoMo, the museum for contemporary and modern art in Trondheim, Norway, the solo show of Ken Price, Alien Terrain, 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 views by Uli Holz / PoMo, Trondheim © Estate of Ken Price

Science fiction and extraterrestrial creations AT POMO

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?

The lumps, layers AND SPECKLED FINISHES OF HIS ceramic WORKS

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.

Ken price, Jazz, and new mexico

Born in Los Angeles, California, Price came to call Taos, New Mexico, home after visiting his friend, the American actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper. He spent the latter half of his life in the vast plains of the southwestern state, finding a sense of ease in being surrounded by the tools of his craft. In the late twentieth century, not only was the United States buzzing with news of the Cold War-era space race, but New Mexico itself, with its sprawling deserts and dusty mountains, was no stranger to stories of alien visits and extraterrestrial sightings. Looking at the artist’s sketches, in which he depicts landscapes in psychedelic colours, it feels as though the mystic air of his home is inseparable from his relationship with shape and color.

When speaking about the artist, his passion for jazz music is often brought up. Not only did it serve as the sonic background to hours-long drawing sessions, but there’s an immediacy to his works that shares the improvisational and frenetic energy of jazz. There are these sketches of Price’s in which smoothly knotted, spiraling and wavy forms—not unlike the pieces in Alien Terrain—splashed in neon hues, emerge from a mountainous landscape. Liquid splashes of watercolor ooze together to form a skyline at dawn or dusk, as if the images are some kind of otherworldly plan for what Price will conjure in his kiln.

Alien Terrain, in showing the abstract, mystical sculptures of Price’s lifetime, draws a connection between the artist’s context and his work. Just as the artist is inextricable from his life in New Mexico, the colorful masses that came to be a hallmark of his style are closely linked to his conception of the world around him. In managing to make these uncanny forms that spark the imagination, Price brings his audience to a place beyond this Earth.

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Ken Price, Crookton, 2006

Ken Price, Crookton, 2006 | all works photography by Fredrik Nilsen © Estate of Ken Price

Ken Price, Crookton, detail, 2006

Ken Price, Cheeks, 1998

Ken Price, Yogi, 2011

Ken Price, Uzza, 2008

Ken Price, Ceejay, 2011

Ken Price, Crypto, 2011

project info: 

exhibition name: Alien Terrain

artist: Ken Price | @kenpricestudio_official

location: PoMo, Trondheim, Norway | @pomo_trondheim

dates: June 25, 2026 – January 3, 2027

in collaboration with: The Ken Price Estate and Matthew Marks Gallery