One of the week’s most decisively broken records was for septuagenarian British Kenyan ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo, whose untitled burnished and carbonized terracotta vessel from 1986 sold after a seven-way contest between London, New York, and online bidders to a U.S.-based collector for a quadruple estimate record of £378,000 ($523,328) at Sotheby’s evening sale of modern and contemporary British art. The work had been acquired at Bonhams London in September 2006 for £27,600 ($38,000) by Daniel Biebuyck, an American scholar of Central African art, who died in 2019. Odundo’s market was quiet for a long time after that purchase, with work appearing occasionally in contemporary African and ceramic art sales, never making any more until November 2020, when a 14.5-inch terracotta vessel sold for a hammer price of £200,000 ($275,000) in a contemporary ceramics sale at London’s Maak auctions.
The shift in price occurred soon after Odundo’s solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in 2019. One of the underbidders at last week’s sale was former Christie’s head of post-war and contemporary art Francis Outred, who is now an independent advisor. Outred had been inspired by Odundo’s 2019 exhibition, where he saw “a range of global influences from the ancient Greeks and Romans to China and Mexico and of course her African heritage,” he said. “This piece was for me a very powerful example, very bodily with sumptuous curves and a typically mystical deep glaze. I have come relatively late to her work, but there is a maturity of form and glaze which compares with the great ceramicists of the 20th century.” Another underbidder was Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of
Salon 94, which recently showed Odundo’s work in New York.