About the artist:

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. 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.