As part of TEFAF New York this May (9 - 14 May 2024), Offer Waterman is delighted to present forty works by three of the most important artists working in ceramics – Lucie Rie, Magdalene Odundo and Jennifer Lee. Considered the leading lights of the ceramic scene, all are artists whose techniques of production, whilst different, are drawn together by their unrivalled understanding and masterful handling of the earth’s most basic material – clay.
Born in Vienna in 1902, Lucie Rie arrived in Britain in 1938, fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria. Alongside a suitcase of carefully packed pots, she brought with her a profound appreciation of the very highest ideals of European Modernism. Rie irrevocably changed the course of the British art scene, reshaping perceptions of ceramics within the realms of art. Through her elegantly thrown stoneware and porcelain vessels, each decorated by hand with luscious, lustrous glazes, Rie not only paved the way for a future generation of makers – including Magdalene Odundo and Jennifer Lee – but also catapulted ceramic arts in Britain onto a global stage.
This will mark the artist’s most expansive public showing in New York since her joint exhibition with Hans Coper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994, as well as the appearance of one of the largest works she ever made, Monumental Vase, 1969.
Unlike Rie, who threw on the wheel, both Magdalene Odundo (b.1950) and Jennifer Lee (b.1956) hand build their forms, working with a rich visual vocabulary refined over many decades. Based around the simple principles of the vessel, each stretches her materials to its very limits. Born in Kenya, Odundo works in low-fired terracotta which is then burnished, creating towering anthropomorphic forms that weave together references from different cultures and geographies – as celebrated in her 2013 Untitled masterpieces, both of which were included in her 2016 blockbuster exhibition Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things, and are being presented for the first time on the open market.
Winner of the prestigious 2018 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Jennifer Lee works in high-fired stoneware with added oxides (but no glazes or surface embellishments) that often draw parallels with the natural world – from her native Scottish Highlands, through to the arid deserts of North America and the mountainous Shiga region of Japan.
These three artists understand and make use of clay in very different ways, creating works that challenge and amaze in equal measure. What unites them is their sheer sophistication, ability and technical understanding of materials and form, elevating their work beyond the craft, and aligning them with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For further press information or images please contact:
Robin-Cawdron Stewart
[email protected] +44 (0)7882 151 823
