Andrew Lord
dal 22/9/2010 al 27/11/2010
Segnalato da
22/9/2010
Andrew Lord
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
This exhibition presents Lord's 30 year career as a constant process of experimentation and refinement that balances a conceptual approach with a sensual appearance. The work derives from a meditation on domestic, everyday instruments and activities as well as a sophisticated play between form and content in a layered practice that includes physical action, representation, translation and remembrance.
Since his earliest exhibitions in the late 1970s, the British artist Andrew Lord has explored sculptural and pictorial concerns using clay, plaster, beeswax, bronze, drawing, printmaking and video. This exhibition provides the first overview of the artist’s career, charting the development of his practice from the minute observation of nature and citation of modern art to casts from the body and use of memory as a sculptural tool.
After extensive travels in Mexico to study pre-Columbian art and in Europe, exploring Paris and modern art, looking at Meissen porcelain, Staffordshire ceramics and the Della Robbia studio in Florence, for example, Lord’s early experiments frequently reworked the traditional forms of jugs, vases and cups. He produced numerous variations of groupings of ceramic forms (eg jug, vase and dish; vase, dish and cup; two vases; and coffee sets) capturing different qualities of light and shade which sometimes echoed the styles of Cezanne, Monet and Picasso. These works increasingly evoked the human figure, eventually culminating in a series of vases that fuse the continuous outline of a vessel with the facial profile of artists who had influenced him, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Paul Gauguin.
Lord moved to New York in the early 1980s where he explored different methods of producing work, increasingly using his own body as a sculptural tool, but maintaining the form of a vessel throughout. A series of work formed in clay, plaster and wax or cast in bronze was produced around the senses with the artist pressing his nose, tongue, eye sockets, ears and teeth into clay to emphasise basic bodily functions such as breathing, smelling, watching and swallowing.
In 2005, Lord moved away from the vessel in order to produce a broader variety of subjects directly related to poetry (particularly Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara), architecture, folklore and landscape. In these works, the emphasis on physical application was increasingly balanced by personal and intuitive responses, often drawing on the artist’s memories of his childhood in Whitworth, Lancashire. A series of recent works, for example, presents a sculptural mind map of the town and its surrounding environment, recalling details of buildings, landscapes and waterfalls.
This exhibition presents Lord’s thirty year career as a constant process of experimentation and refinement that balances a conceptual approach with a sensual appearance. The work derives from a meditation on domestic, everyday instruments and activities as well as a sophisticated play between form and content in a layered practice that includes physical action, representation, translation and remembrance.
Artist Information
Andrew Lord was born in Rochdale, England in 1950 and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. In 1972, he worked in a ceramics factory in Delft, Holland, set up a studio in Rotterdam, then Amsterdam and travelled to Mexico on a British Council scholarship in 1974. He moved to New York in the early 1980s, where he still lives and works. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Artist Monograph
The artist’s first comprehensive monograph includes a text by art historian Dawn Ades, an interview between Andrew Lord and James Rondeau (Curator, Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago) and introductions by Elsa Longhauser, Director of Santa Monica Museum of Art and Anthony Spira, Director of Milton Keynes Gallery. Produced in collaboration with Santa Monica Museum of Art. Available from 12 October from the Gallery Shop, price £30, excluding postage & packing.
Funding
The exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery has been funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation and The Henry Moore Foundation.
With additional support from Gladstone Gallery, New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, and the Exhibition Circle of Friends.
Image: Sixteen pieces. Angled. 1986 Ceramic, epoxy and gold leaf, varying dimensions. Courtesy the artist. Photograph by Douglas M. Parker Studio, Los Angeles
Press Information
For further information and images, please contact: Katharine Sorensen, Communications
Director, on 01908 558 318 / k.sorensen@mk-g.org.
Preview: 23 September, 6pm – 10pm All welcome
Milton Keynes Gallery
900 Midsummer Boulevard
Central Milton Keynes MK9 3QA
Opening Hours
Tuesday – Friday 12noon – 8pm
Saturday 11am – 8pm
Sunday 11am – 5pm
Admission free