Andrew Lord
24 September –28 November 2010
900 Midsummer Boulevard
Central Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Admission free
Since his earliest exhibitions in the late 1970s, British artist Andrew Lord has experimented with 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 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 ceramic forms capturing different qualities of light and shade which sometimes echoed the styles of Cézanne, 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 influential artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Paul Gauguin.
Lord moved to New York in the early 1980s where he increasingly used his own body as a sculptural tool, but maintained 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.
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. His work was increasingly determined 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.
The 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.
Abridged Artist’s Biography
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.
Key exhibitions include his first solo show at Anthony Stokes Gallery in 1978 and shows in 1980 and 1985 at Art & Project, Amsterdam’s leading contemporary art gallery and platform for international conceptual artists including Daniel Buren, Gilbert & George and Sol Lewitt. In 1987, Lord was included in an exhibition at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld alongside a generation of sculptors such as Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Katarina Fritsch and Franz West. Lord exhibited in galleries in the US, Europe and South Korea throughout the 1990s and featured in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. More recently, Lord was included in Ugo Rondinone’s ‘The Third Mind’ at the Palais de Tokyo in 2007.
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’s Monograph
The artist’s first comprehensive monograph will be available, with contributions by art historian Dawn Ades and James Rondeau (Curator, Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago). Produced in collaboration with Santa Monica Museum of Art. Available from the Gallery Shop.
Limited Edition Woodcut
Harry without his arm, 2010. Paper size 559 x 381 mm; 22 x 15 in. Paper size 559 x 381 mm; 22 x 15 in. Edition of 40. Printed on Somerset buff paper. Signed and dated by the artist. Printed by Wesley M. Berg. Available to order from the Gallery Shop, inclusive of a free, signed copy of the Artist’s Monograph.
Press contact: Katharine Sorensen + 44 (0)1908 558318 / k.sorensen [at] mk-g.org
The exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery has been funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Henry Moore Foundation and the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation with additional support from Gladstone Gallery, New York, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, and the Exhibition Circle of Friends.
Milton Keynes Gallery is supported by Arts Council England South East and Milton Keynes Council.
*Image above:
Courtesy of the artist.
Photography by Douglas M. Parker Studio, Los Angeles.