Lot 64. Magdalene Odundo (born Nairobi, 1950), Untitled (Anthropomorphic Sculpture), 1991, signed and dated under foot: Odundo 1991.. Height: 16 7/8 (42.9 cm).  Estimate 40,000 -- 60,000 USD. Lot sold 134,500 USD. Photo: Sotheby's.

Provenance: Anthony Ralph Gallery, New York
Werner Muensterberger, New York, acquired from the above on April 25, 1991

Exhibited: Anthony Ralph Gallery, New York, Magdalene Odundo, 1991

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 sculptures assume the shape of vessels only superficially. In fact, they represent spiritual containers and mirror certain ideas and concepts, in the Muensterberger sculpture female beauty. 

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 Muensterberger sculpture, partially anthracite. 

Sotheby's. Masterpieces of African Art from the Collection of the Late Werner Muensterberger, New York, 11 May 2012