A Montana native and frequent collaborator of Peter Voulkos, Rudy Autio's trajectory in American craft history is often tied to his, as Voulkos notes: "From the beginning we had a lot in common; we had clay, music, guitars, art, Montana, immigrant parents, new families, no money, military service, the G.I. Bill, athlete's foot, and a passion for making stuff." (Makers, p. 229). In the 1950s Autio worked side by side with Voulkos in Montana at the Archie Bray Foundation and then, independently, as a ceramics instructor at the University of Montana. Like Voulkos, Autio left ceramics for a period of time to work in metal, along with glass and cast cement, before ultimately returning to ceramics by 1980. The present lot is an excellent example of Autio's work of this later period: a two-sided form with "ears," or extensions, which are the protruding limbs of the figures depicted on the surfaces, defined by heavy black outlines. Repetitively populated with depictions of female nudes and horses, Autio’s subject matter has often-debated significance as Autio simply claimed he was the horse, leaving critical analyses to assign their own conclusions.

Examples of Autio’s ceramic sculptures are held in the permanent collections of several institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.