Andrew Lord

Installation view, 2019: Andrew Lord, Thirty pieces. Sorrow. (for T), 1996. Ceramic, epoxy and gold leaf, 83.7 × 800 × 140 cm. © 2019 Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands. Presented by Andrew Lord in honor of Adriaan van Ravesteijn and Geert van Beijeren. © Photography: Marjon Gemmeke Installation view of Andrew Lord: Unslumbrous Night at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Bluhm Family Terrace, October 26, 2017–April 15, 2018. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago. Andrew Lord (born 1950) is an English artist based in New York, primarily known for ceramics and drawings. In a 2010 monograph on the occasion of his exhibition at the Milton Keynes Gallery, Dawn Adès commented that his sculpture, informed by painting, ceramics, poetry, the natural world and the city,

Early life

Lord was born in Rochdale, Lancashire. He attended Rochdale College of Art and the Central School of Art and Design, London.

Career At the Central School, he encountered two influential teachers, Gilbert Harding Green and Bonnie van de Wetering. Though, it soon became clear to him that the direction of the course was not for him approach to sculpting in clay. such as Cubism, Process Art and Performance. In his final year at the Central School Lord travelled to Italy to study the works of the Della Robbia workshop and in 1972 he was included in the exhibition "International Ceramics" at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In the same year he travelled to the Netherlands to work at "de Porceleyne Fles" Delft and Staffordshire ceramics and De Stijl. Andrew Lord, woman reclining I, 2017, Bronze, 13 x 16 1/8 x 8 3/4 inches (33 x 41 x 22.2 cm), Edition of 3 + 1AP, © Andrew Lord. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Exhibition posters for Andrew Lord: Unslumbrous Night, 2017, at the Art Institute of Chicago. © Andrew Lord. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago. As writer, artist, and authority on ceramics Tony Birks noted in 1976, Lord's distinctive approach placed him at the tense boundary of fine art and craft: “It is ironic that his carefully and deliberately made pieces are in distinguished public and private collections around the world, by way of fine art galleries, but are regarded as crude, childish or clumsy by some of the regular outlets for hand-made objects.” Henry Geldzahler explained Lord's vision as, "precipitated by a sudden confrontation with the history of painting and sculpture and modern art in particular." Of this time, Lord said, “I tried to understand how Picasso, Cezanne and Monet had looked at objects and how they had observed light and shade. In my studio in Rotterdam I painted the objects I was making as if through other artists eyes. When a particular kind of light fell across a plate or vase I recorded it with brushstrokes I’d seen in paintings.” installed on Barry Flanagan's Rowford Process furniture. and began working with the leading Dutch art gallery, Art & Project making his second solo exhibition "Angled Pottery" with the gallery in 1980.

In 1981, Kasper Koenig included him in the exhibition, "Heute-Westkunst," at Museen der Stadt Koln, Rheinhalle in Cologne after which he left Amsterdam for New York. In the New York Times John Russell called his US debut, “The most original show of the month, and the most difficult to categorize ... before long we realise that they may not really be sculptures at all, but paintings that happen to be performed as much as painted, in three dimensions. His pieces are sculpture in that we can walk all around them, but fundamentally they are paintings.” the recent ceramic sculpture by the British artist Andrew Lord look as if they’d been made by a clumsy but aesthetically sensitive giant. Contemporary clay sculpture doesn’t get much better than this.” by Jerry Saltz, Lord's work from the 1970s onwards was collected primarily by fellow artists including Barry Flanagan, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Lancaster,

Ceramics historian Garth Clark described Lord as ‘a style’s originator’. In 2015 he wrote, “There is something of an irony about the work in Andrew Lord’s new exhibition at Barbara Gladstone Gallery...Lord has always been unique, a loner. His approach to clay gives an aura of craftlessness...the seeming casualness with which he moves the clay and the “sloppy” glazing has irked the ceramics community for five decades while at the same time intriguing the art world. However, now his “look” is everywhere, Lord Pots and Lord Sculptures abound throughout New York and beyond...For the first time Lord is now competing in a genre he pioneered and in many ways founded.”

Describing Simon de Pury’s 2015 exhibition ‘Fire’ at Venus over Manhattan Gallery, Ian Volner wrote, ‘The medium first caught Simon’s attention in the mid-1990s, when he happened on a show by Lord, a New York–based ceramicist, at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Lord’s expressive, unconventional handling of the material made a lasting impression not just on de Pury, but also on a generation of artists who have taken up ceramics in the years since. “He’s been very influential,” says the curator, who managed to draw together Lord and some of the artists the ceramicist has inspired for the Venus Over Manhattan show.’