Elsa Sahal's Tribute to Ken Price at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York City
At the Nathalie Karg Gallery on 127 Elizabeth Street, until June 28, is the third exhibition of the talented French ceramist, Elsa Sahal (born 1975) is featured in a very smart installation called “Pulp and Polish.” This show, dedicated and inspired by the significant work of Ken Price (American, 1935-2012) a renowned artist, teacher and ceramist she discovered in 2008, whose extensive body of work focused on small-scale organic forms that elicited humor, delicacy, color and great admiration. Elsa writes, “Also the way they are playful and free, his pieces have a sense of dynamism, it gives you motivation to get on the move and work, play, love!”
Beginning in 1994, Elsa’s ceramic training included rigorous study at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Beaux-Arts in Bangkok, a residency in Seoul University discovering raku, then at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, learning high fire glazes. At Alfred University, the premier American teaching venue for ceramics, which she attended as student and guest professor seeking the guidance, mentorship and inspiration of John Gill (American, b. 1949) the iconoclastic teacher who inspired “freedom of form and glaze, stating that his favorite color was stripes!”
In 2013, as Curator of “Body and Soul,” a contemporary international ceramic exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, I included her dark, dramatic, large-scale work, “Pieds noirs” (Black feet) as they poignantly referenced the derision of Sephardic Jews and others living in the French territories of North America re-entering France.
Elsa Sahal’s significant political agenda has been to tweak images of the female body with humor, passion, and pride. “There are no faces in my ceramics; they are often bodies recomposed from fragments...the fragility of life is carried by the fragility of the material.”
Represented by the Papillon Gallery, France, she has had many opportunities to model clay with the intent of adoring and adorning the female body, with a prominent large-scale fountain commission for a Paris park and an upcoming subway commission in Toulouse; juggling large scale and small.
This exhibition she identifies as: “An Homage to Ken Price,” with over 40 delightful iterations of clever shapes and glazes mimicking this master.
Sahal’s most recent recognition in France is the impressive award from Marie Claire and Boucheron, the “Her Art Prize,” 2026. Enjoy and appreciate her skill and commentary in the beautiful catalog, “Elsa Sahal,” JBE Books, 2025, which concludes with a quote from the French writer, Alexandra Midal: “Amoral, incisive and unruly, Elsa Sahal’s ceramics offer the opportunity for a meeting between different entities addressing all the Guérillères and stowaways of history and life.”