Gone are the days of ceramics being relegated purely to the ‘craft’, as today this versatile and universally regarded medium is being celebrated at the highest echelons of the art world. As part of the annual TEFAF New York fair London-based gallery Offer Waterman will be presenting forty exceptional works by three of the most celebrated artists working in ceramic over the past century. Lucie Rie, Magdalene Odundo and Jennifer Lee are widely 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.
The subject of a recent retrospective touring MIMA in Middlesborough, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and The Holburne Museum, Bath, few artists were to have so profound an impact on a specific field as Lucie Rie had over the course of contemporary ceramics. As Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth with direct carving, and Ben Nicholson with pure abstraction, Rie trod a new path and in doing so irrevocably shaped the course of ceramics in Britain and beyond.
Born in Vienna in 1902, Rie arrived in England 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. Her story has become the stuff of artistic legend – from her handmade ceramic buttons to her friendship with fellow émigré artist Hans Coper. She is famed for her elegantly thrown stoneware and porcelain vessels, each decorated by hand with luscious, lustrous glazes. The twenty-five pieces by Rie on show at TEFAF New York represent some of her most accomplished works – from the richly wrinkled bronzing that tops a stunning mustard-yellow bowl, through to her intricate and impressive sgraffito bowl, formerly in the collection of the late Cyril Frankel, and featured in the famed 1989 exhibition Issey Miyake Meets Lucie Rie in Tokyo. Also, making its first public appearance in almost thirty years is a work that is amongst the largest Rie ever made – Monumental Vase from 1969, commissioned as a gift to the former Co-Chairman of Ove Arup & Partners, Sir Jack Zunz.
The impact that Rie had over a future generation of artists is perhaps her most important lasting legacy. Through her work as well as her teaching she challenged perceptions of what ceramics could mean within the context of ‘fine arts’ and paved the way for artists such as Magdalene Odundo and Jennifer Lee.
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Unlike Rie, who threw on the wheel, both Magdalene Odundo and Jennifer Lee hand build their pieces, 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, producing breathtakingly balanced forms that are collected by both museums and private collectors across the world.
Born in Kenya, Odundo works in low-fired terracotta which is then burnished, creating towering anthropomorphic forms that weave together references from difference cultures and geographies – as celebrated in her 2019 blockbuster exhibition Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things at The Hepworth Wakefield and The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich. Two works that featured in this exhibition will be presented by Offer Waterman at TEFAF New York, both appearing 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, where she has held various residencies. Producing only a handful of works each year, her pieces are highly sought after by collectors and her unique, beautiful forms – such as her ‘emerging rims’ of the 1990s – are housed in many of the most important museum collections. TEFAF New York will offer a rare chance to see eleven works by the artist gathered together from private collections.
To say that the market for ceramics is strong is a wild understatement – with auction records seemingly smashed to smithereens every few months (in December last year a 1980 bowl by Rie sold at auction for over 400,000 Euros, whilst a few months earlier a work by Odundo from 1999 hammered down for £533,400). Yet the great thing about collecting ceramics is the breadth of works on offer, with different pieces to fit different collector’s budgets (prices for works with Offer Waterman at TEFAF New York start well below the $20,000 mark). And with such a clear upward trajectory in the market, more and more new collectors are coming to the fore, which can only be a good thing for the ceramic artists of tomorrow.
Lucie Rie, Magdalene Odundo, Jennifer Lee: 40 Works from Private Collections will be on show with Offer Waterman at TEFAF New York from 10th – 14th May, at the Park Avenue Armory. For more information or for tickets visit waterman.co.uk
