Magdalene Odundo
Magdalene Odundo
2 September 2027—9 January 2028
Barbican, London, UK
Launching the 2027 autumn programme, the Barbican will stage an exhibition of artist Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950, Nairobi, Kenya). This will be Odundo’s first solo institutional presentation in London in over 30 years.
Situated in the Barbican’s new Lakeside Gallery, home last year to the critically acclaimed Encounters: Giacometti series, the exhibition will present Odundo’s poetic exploration of the ceramic vessel as an elemental form that resonates across time, geographies, and cultures. Taking gestures from everyday life as dynamic cues, Odundo’s vessels have a bodily presence, their forms evoking swelling bellies, swaying torsos and gaping mouths. Considering the human body as a vessel itself, Odundo sees her own body as a channel for transforming her thoughts into clay.
Odundo views vessels, which are among the first tools created by humans, as intrinsically transcultural objects. Her works invoke conceptually and materially layered histories and her decades-long research has led her to draw rich inspiration from diverse sources – ranging from ancient Egyptian, Japanese and Aztec sculpture to Kenyan and Nigerian burial rites to Elizabethan fashion and European modernism. Created from the life-giving materiality of the earth, her clay forms are reminders of a shared humanity and vitality.