Magdalene Odundo (born Nairobi, 1950), Untitled (Anthropomorphic Sculpture), 1991

signed and dated under foot: Odundo 1991.

Anthony Ralph Gallery, New York
Werner Muensterberger, New York, acquired from the above on April 25, 1991

Anthony Ralph Gallery, New York, Magdalene Odundo, 1991

George Nelson Preston, "Dr. Werner Muensterberger", Tribal Arts Magazine, No. 39, Autumn/Winter 2005, p. 121, fig. 11

Excellent condition. Some tiny, very minor marks and scratches. Color is mottled from firing process as shown in photographs, with some small remains of ash on the surface in places.
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Much of Kenyan born (1950, Nairobi) Magdalene Odundo's inspiration is drawn from the ceramic tradition of her roots on the Ugandan/Kenyan border. In keeping with modern sculptors (such as Brancusi and Arp) she focuses on the search for perfection in form. Working within a highly personal and meaningful artistic idiom, Odundo's sculptures assume the shape of vessels only superficially. In fact, they represent spiritual containers and mirror certain ideas and concepts, in the Muensterberger sculpture female beauty.

Odundo's ceramics are hand built, using a coiling technique. She does not use the wheel, preferring instead to shape her vessels without its restraints of rotational symmetry. Similarly, the surfaces on her vessels are not glazed but instead laboriously burnished, covered with slip, and burnished again. When thoroughly dry the pots are fired in a gas kiln, first in an oxidizing atmosphere, which turns them a naturally bright red-orange, and, as in this case, often a second time, enclosed in a special container filled with wood chips and shavings, so that the combustion of the wood fuel in an oxygen-poor, "reduced" atmosphere causes the clay to chemically alter and turn black or, as in the Muensterberger sculpture, partially anthracite.

Odundo's work is represented in over 40 public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The British Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The National Museum of African Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (both at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.