Andrew Lord (artist)
| Andrew Lord | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 Rochdale, Lancashire |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Central School of Art and Design London, England |
| Known for | Sculpture |
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, exemplifies, "The centrality of material things to memory, experience, associations."
Lord was born in Rochdale, Lancashire. He attended Rochdale College of Art and the Central School of Art and Design, London. His early influences were artists connected with the north of England; Henry Moore, the painter LS Lowry and the poet Ted Hughes, as well as the Lancashire landscape.
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 as Lord said, “I liked working with clay but I went through a training I didn’t like.” In 1971, upon graduating Lord exhibited his maverick approach to sculpting in clay. Throughout the 70s and 80s he explored both art historical and contemporary movements more associated with the domain of fine art 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" a ceramics factory in Delft, at first constructing large-scale sculptures in the factory’s Architectural Department, later working in the Experimental Department a studio for artists within the factory. As he told curator Richard Armstrong in the catalogue to his 1993 exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, “I did my own work there for six months until I was asked to leave...my work was not considered to be of a high enough standard.”
In this period he discovered the sculptors Johann Gottlieb Kirchner and Johann Joachim Kaendler of Meissen, Delft and Staffordshire ceramics and De Stijl.
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.” In 1974, with a scholarship from the British Council Lord travelled throughout Mexico looking at pre-Columbian art and architecture, attached to the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. In 1975 he returned to Rotterdam, where he received a three-year stipend from the Rotterdam Art Foundation. Whilst living there he travelled extensively in Europe and made frequent visits to Paris where he looked at paintings made there at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and discovered the ceramics of Paul Gauguin.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.”
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