The artist Ken Price came home a few weeks ago with a little help from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and his longtime friend, the architect Frank Gehry. In "Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective," on view at LACMA through Jan. 6, 2013, the curator Stephanie Barron has brought together 100 of Price's sculptures from the past 50 years in a spectacular exhibition thoughtfully designed by Gehry. It is a fitting tribute to an artist who passed away in February after a long battle with cancer. A native Angeleno who spent the last few decades working in Taos, N.M., Price has long been seen as an "artist's artist" who, like his ceramics mentor Peter Voulkos, sought to break down the rigid if artificially imposed barriers between the world of craft and the three-dimensional exploration of the form in contemporary art. Price spent his career working with clay in ways unlike anyone else, breathing new life into the medium as he pushed it from the functional to the abstract. The exhibition, which spans the breadth of Price's output, including sculptures that have become known as his slumps, rocks, geometrics, cups, eggs and mounds, unfolds in reverse chronological order, opening with his most recent and best-known works, the multicolored organic blobs that gracefully move over their own forms like exquisite flows of lava. Price achieved the sculptures' mottled colors by applying as many as 70 layers of paint, which he then painstakingly sanded away to reveal the different archaeological layers of pigment. Moving through the exhibition one gets a sense of the de-evolution at work as traditional functional ceramic objects like cups morph into beautiful but nonfunctional blobs. "I make concrete objects that stay the same pretty much for the whole time they exist, and you can go away, and you can come back, and maybe you've changed, but the object will still be the same," Price said in 2005. Price favored the ephemeral gesture over the monumental flourish, and Gehry's design for the exhibition follows a similar path, sensitively emphasizing the artist's achievements while paying tribute to the understated qualities of his work. "Ken's work has a sense of clarity and unselfconscious sense of humor," he writes in his catalog essay. It speaks volumes; it speaks of pleasure and love, and speaks of beauty without bravado. It also influenced the architect's own work. Price's early architectonic clay sculptures, for example, inspired Gehry's design for the California Aerospace Museum. Gehry's approach to the LACMA installation emphasizes this connection, in free-floating rooms within the pavilion that include knocked-out sections that echo the voids in Price's sculptures. "I can't imagine living in a place without a Ken Price," Gehry writes. Visitors to the exhibition will know exactly what he means.