Magdalene Odundo (born Nairobi, 1950), Untitled, 1991
Provenance: Nancy Margolis, New York, acquired from the artist
Dr. David V. Becker, New York, acquired from the above in the early 1990s
Note: Much of Kenyan born (1950, Nairobi) Magdalene Odundo's inspiration is drawn from the ceramic tradition of her roots on the Ugandan/Kenyan border. In keeping with modern sculptors (such as Brancusi and Arp) she focuses on the search for perfection in form. Working within a highly personal and meaningful artistic idiom, Odundo's vessels are not meant to be used as physical containers but rather as transcendental ones.
Odundo's ceramics are hand built, using a coiling technique. She does not use the wheel, preferring instead to shape her vessels without its restraints of rotational symmetry. Similarly, the surfaces on her vessels are not glazed but instead laboriously burnished, covered with slip, and burnished again. When thoroughly dry the pots are fired in a gas kiln, first in an oxidizing atmosphere, which turns them a naturally bright red-orange, and, as in this case, often a second time, enclosed in a special container filled with wood chips and shavings, so that the combustion of the wood fuel in an oxygen-poor, "reduced" atmosphere causes the clay to chemically alter and turn black or, as in the present vessel, a deep, varied anthracite coloring.
Odundo's work is represented in over 40 public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The British Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The National Museum of African Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (both at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The present sculpture, from the collection of the late New York physician Dr. David V. Becker, is distinguished by its impressive size and perfect symmetry; invoking the form of the human body using formal elements drawn from classical Africa and Western modernism alike.
Sotheby's. African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art Including Property from the Krugier and Lasansky Collections, New York, 16 May 2014