The present work is an example from Andrew Lord’s most important and innovative bodies of work, marking a significant transition in his artistic production. Lord had studied art and trained in ceramics in London in the 1960s, and moved to Rotterdam in the early 1970s, where he worked for a year at a porcelain factory in Delft. Whilst living in The Netherlands, Lord travelled through Europe, visiting museums and studying collections of modern painting and sculpture, which formed the basis of inspiration for the next two decades of his work. Lord’s study of the Impressionist or Cubist treatment of form and light were directly executed in object form, in a sort of reverse still life, as in the present lot. Whilst the forms remained recognisably traditional in nature – vases, dishes, tea sets – they were ‘disrupted forms.’ Using a slab of clay, Lord sketched a two-dimensional representation of light and shadow, and then deconstructed and reconstructed the objects using this new, inventive geometry, synthesising the whole composition, brush strokes and all, into three dimensions.

Lord worked in series, sketching sets that would continue to explore these expressive translations, and named them quite literally based on his inspiration – Cubist Set, Cézanne Set, and, as in the present work, Italian Set. The Italian Set was created in 1981, the same year as his debut exhibition in the United States at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York, and is an extraordinary example of this radical, iconic period of early work, preceding his experimental treatments of glazing and surfaces and expansive installations, the budding notions of which are all visible here.

Andrew Lord presently lives and works in New York and his sculptures are held in the permanent collections of several institutions globally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Museum Boijimans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.