Magdalene Odundo Makes Her Canadian Debut at the Gardiner Museum

Photo: Cristian Barnett

Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects

October 19, 2023 – April 21, 2024
Gardiner Museum, Toronto

Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects features the exquisite sculptural vessels of one of the world’s most esteemed ceramic artists, Dame Magdalene Odundo. Her first exhibition in Canada and the largest ever presentation of her work in North America, the show brings together works spanning the artist’s career, including new pieces directly from her studio.

On view through April 21, 2024, the exhibition is co-curated by Odundo and Dr. Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum.

Since the early 1980s, Odundo has pursued a singular vision centered on the refined, magisterial ceramic vessel. Made entirely by hand and finished to a smooth, lustrous sheen, these works are uniquely her own while also synthesizing traditions of ceramics and other media from multiple global cultures.

Odundo’s sensuous vessels refer to the human body. Narrow feet, rounded bellies, elongated necks, and gentle protuberances create gesture and narrative. The artist works on a single vessel for months, slowly and rhythmically, pouring years of experimentation and technical mastery into each piece.

In the exhibition her works are presented in dialogue with art and artifacts from many time periods and cultures, ranging from ancient Mediterranean figurines to monumental Abstract Expressionist painting, to explore the connections that unite us.

Early on as a student in England, Odundo began visiting British museums where she first encountered such works. While amassed as an assertion of colonial power and authority, Odundo engaged with these collections as an artist, woman, and potter from the Global South, finding connections between them and the world she experienced growing up in Kenya.

The exhibition design invites visitors to conceptually enter Odundo’s hollow forms. Described by the artist as “the space I go to hide in,” it is a site of contemplation, containing a silence needed to enable reflection on her experiences growing up in colonial Africa. While not widely read as political, we can now understand Odundo’s practice—embodied, hybrid, and anti-colonial—as deeply engaged with questions of power, justice, and what makes us human.

For more information and to get tickets visit gardinermuseum.com.

Magdalene Odundo, Untitled, 1995. Carbonized and burnished terracotta, 17 x 11 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Jane and Gerald Katcher, LL.B. 1950. © Magdalene Odundo

About the Artist

Dame Magdalene Anyango Namakhiya Odundo was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950. Raised in Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, and in Nairobi, she also spent several years in India as a youth. She trained as a graphic designer in Kenya before moving to the United Kingdom in 1971 for further study at the Cambridge School of Art, where she began working with clay. She soon enrolled at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (formerly the West Surrey College of Art & Design), where she received a degree in ceramics, printmaking, and photography. Odundo earned a postgraduate degree in ceramics from the Royal College of Art, London in 1982.

Odundo has exhibited internationally over the past forty years, while also teaching at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, and being a parent. She is one of the pre-eminent living ceramic artists, with works in numerous museum collections, including: the British Museum (London); the Victoria and Albert Museum (London); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Brooklyn Museum; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Museum of Kenya (Nairobi); and the Gardiner Museum.

In 2008, Odundo became an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for Services to the Arts and Education. In 2018, she was appointed chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts and in 2020 she was made a Dame. Odundo lives and works in Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom.

This is her first exhibition in Canada and her largest in North America.

About the Gardiner Museum

The Gardiner Museum brings together people of all ages and communities through the shared values of creativity, wonder, and community that clay and ceramic traditions inspire.

We engage audiences with exhibitions, programs, and hands-on classes, while stewarding a significant permanent collection. We interpret historical ceramics to emphasize their relevance today, and champion emerging and established Canadian artists and their role in the broader world. We innovate through clay education, as we bring together the experience of making with a deeper understanding of the art of ceramics.

We believe in making, looking, and thinking through clay.

The Gardiner Museum has a collection of over 5,000 objects from the Ancient Americas, Europe, Japan and China, as well as contemporary works with an emphasis on leading Canadian artists. The Gardiner Museum is among the few museums in the world focused on ceramics and is one of the world’s most notable specialty museums.
For more information, please visit: gardinermuseum.com.

Accessibility

The Gardiner Museum is an accessible venue with a ramp from the street leading up to the main lobby entrance. The entrance is accessible via two sets of double doors with an access button. Accessible restrooms are available on the second and third floors. Third floor washrooms are also gender neutral.

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