Skip to Content
Today Open today 10–11 members | 11–5 public

man standing juggling three balls by first light of day

A work made of ceramic, steel, epoxy, and gold leaf.

Image actions

  • A work made of ceramic, steel, epoxy, and gold leaf.

Date:

2017

Artist:

Andrew Lord
English, born 1950

About this artwork

Andrew Lord uses traditional ceramic forms and techniques to address the foremost sculptural and pictorial concerns of 19th- and 20th-century modernism. He recalls, “In the 1970s, I looked at paintings in Amsterdam and Paris and discovered Gauguin’s ceramics, which seemed to have meaning in a way I’d not seen before in ceramics.” Like Gauguin, Lord straddles the boundaries of fine art and craft, abandoning functionality and practicality in favor of conceptual concerns. Through serial display and repetitive investigation of form, Lord transforms everyday objects into extraordinary expressions of light and shadow, volume and plasticity, surface and shape.
Lord conceived this new series during a residency in Paris. He was struck by the title of a Paul-Albert Baudouin mural in the Petit Palais, The Hours of the Day and Night, which described his own days of artistic wandering without a clear destination. While in Paris, Lord collected images from 19th- and 20th-century painting—especially works by Pablo Picasso—that portray time passing and the fragility of the human condition: “To give these images plastic form, I passed them through each step of making that had come before, as if watching film stills through a sleepless night, until I took the most familiar form, the human figure, extracted it from its surroundings, connected it to the night, to time, to my sleep- lessness, and filtered it through everything I made before.”

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Contemporary Art

Artist

Andrew Lord

Title

man standing juggling three balls by first light of day

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

2017

Medium

ceramic, steel, epoxy, and gold leaf

Dimensions

116.9 × 52.1 × 40.7 cm (46 × 20 1/2 × 16 in.)

Credit Line

Eloise W. Martin Legacy Fund

Reference Number

2018.272.5

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

Share

Sign up for our enewsletter to receive updates.

Learn more

Image actions

Share