Magdalene Odundo @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - Ceramic Vessels and a Large-Scale Glass Installation

Magdalene Odundo

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

13 November 2025 —​ 24 January 2026

Xavier Hufkens presents Kenyan-born British artist Magdalene Odundo’s first exhibition at the gallery. Featuring a new body of ceramic vessels and the large-scale glass installation Transition II (2014), the exhibition showcases the two central disciplines that shape her artistic practice.

At the heart of the exhibition is a recent series of ceramic vessels, a form that has been a cornerstone of Odundo’s practice for nearly five decades. These vessels, refined in shape and rich in symbolism, draw inspiration from a wide array of global ceramic traditions—African, European, Asian, and Indigenous American – as by the human body, which Magdalene Odundo likewise regards as a vessel. Her work carries a distinct anthropomorphic presence: gestures, physical states and bodily movements often serve as starting points for a vessel’s form, silhouette, proportion or balance. As one of the oldest and most universal of human-made objects, vessels transcend time, geography and culture. Moreover, they are rich with dualities: inside and outside, fullness and emptiness, fragility and strength. These oppositions echo the deeper conceptual themes in the artist’s oeuvre, such as transition, identity and cultural hybridity. For Magdalene Odundo, the vessel is more than a physical object. It is an archetypal and elemental form through which to articulate relationships – between materials, histories, cultures and individuals.

The making of each vessel is a laborious and intensely physical act. Working alone, Magdalene Odundo hand-builds her vessels using coiling techniques before meticulously burnishing their surfaces. The distinctive colours – typically deep terracotta and lustrous black – emerge from a controlled firing process. This slow, embodied method underscores the intimate relationship between maker and material. In Odundo’s practice, the vessel is not a static object, but a living entity. Left unglazed, the works retain a subtle porosity, enhancing their sense of life and allowing them, quite literally, to "breathe."

Also on view is Transition II (2014), a large-scale installation comprising 1001 suspended glass vessels. Each vessel is individually mouth-blown yet they are united by a formal coherence that balances repetition and variation. In contrast to Odundo’s ceramic practice, which is a solitary activity, glass-blowing is a collective endeavour. The vessels in Transition II are inspired by an ancient Egyptian glass earplug in the Petrie Museum in London, a reflection of Odundo’s ongoing engagement with historical forms and cross-cultural material references. The resulting objects appear to hover in space: weightless and precarious; they are ‘hanging by a thread’. Glass, like clay, is an ancient and elemental medium, both ubiquitous and fragile, that is transformed by fire. In a phenomenon known as the ‘melt memory effect’, it retains information about its previous crystalline structure, even after heating above its glass transition temperature. These qualities are central to Transition II, and resonate with broader themes in Odundo’s practice.

The installation draws visual and conceptual parallels with a murmuration – a phenomenon in which large flocks of starlings move in coordinated, shape-shifting formations. Within this work, each glass shape maintains its singularity while simultaneously contributing to an energetic, collective rhythm. In an era increasingly marked by fragmentation and estrangement, Transition II speaks of gathering and mutual recognition, whereby uniqueness and difference contribute to a dynamic whole.

Magdalene A N Odundo (b. 1950) received her initial training as a graphic artist in Kenya before moving to the UK in 1971. She studied at the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. In 2018, Magdalene Odundo was appointed Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts (UCA) and was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year Honours list in 2020. She has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England (2024); the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada (2023-2024); The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England and Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, England (2019); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, USA (2017); British Council, Nairobi, Kenya (2005); Blackwell House, Bowness-on-Windermere, England (2001); The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., USA (1995); Stedelijk Museum Voor Hedendaagse Kunst, s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (1994); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; and Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany (1992).

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Harri Koskinen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - "Magnitude" Exhibition

Harri Koskinen: Magnitude

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

 

Harri Koskinen one of Finland’s most renowned designers, presents a new exhibition shaped by compelling, multi-layered themes that navigate borderlands between the mythical and the contemporary. Elements subtly reminiscent of survival gear suggest preparation for an uncertain future, serving as a quiet reminder of today’s volatile global climate. At the same time, the exhibition drifts into the realm of myth and adventure. Rather than creating ominous imagery, Harri Koskinen explores the delicate tension between the material form and conceptual depth of his work.

The exhibition presents a selection of unique glass sculptures, both free-blown and mold-cast. Glass, with its reactive sensitivity, naturally lends itself to the creation of multi-layered forms. As a material born from the transformation of sand through intense heat, then cooled into solid form, glass inherently embodies shifting states of matter. Koskinen’s minimalist visual vocabulary resonates beautifully with the fragility of his medium. Most of the featured sculptures were handcrafted at the historic glassworks in Iittala and Riihimäki, with select pieces produced in Switzerland. This marks Koskinen’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Forsblom.

HARRI KOSKINEN (b. 1970), is a highly versatile designer known for his conceptual approach. His practice spans both serial production and one-offs. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has served as design director at Iittala and collaborated with prestigious international brands including Artek, Genelec, Hermès, Issey Miyake, Muu, and Svenskt Tenn. Among his many accolades are the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, the Compasso d’Oro Award, and the Pro Finlandia Medal. Harri Koskinen lives and works in Espoo and Helsinki.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

Rindon Johnson @ François Ghebaly Gallery, NYC - Cuvier

Rindon Johnson: Cuvier

François Ghebaly Gallery, New York

September 7 – October 15, 2022

RINDON JOHNSON

Slick meddling elbow deep errant ornament (canyon), 2022 (detail)

Stained glass, patinated steel frame 

78 x 60.5 x 23 inches (199 x 153.5 x 58 cm)

© Rindon Johnson, courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery

François Ghebaly presents Cuvier by Rindon Johnson, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York space. Following his presentation at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Rindon Johnson’s latest body of work offers homage to Ziphius cavirostris, or the Cuvier’s Beaked Whale and features new sculptures in stained glass, a work in cow leather and bleach exposed to the elements, and a new video game that places players in the perceptual apparatus of the whale.

The Cuvier’s Beaked Whale is among the deepest divers in our oceans. In temperate and tropical waters across the globe, the whales hunt for squid at depths of over 800 meters. Their bodies are uniquely adapted for such feats: scientists postulate that with each dive they dilate their lungs to handle the pressure of such an altitudinal shift. A rare sight in the wild, the whales were first thought to be a wholly extinct lineage based on the unique rostral cavities that French naturalist George Cuvier observed in skull fragments. These superlatives make the whale a mysterious subject among marine biologists—apt for the sorts of throughlines that guide poet and multidisciplinary artist Rindon Johnson’s conceptual acumen.

In their new (and first) video game, Rindon Johnson and artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork draw on fragmentary data to speculate a firsthand visual and acoustic account of the beaked whale’s hunting habits. Not unlike modern first-person shooters, gameplay is situated from the whale’s point of view; players use the joysticks of an Xbox controller to harmonize their sonic movements in attempts to catch their squid prey gliding between egresses of the deep submarine Great Bahama Canyon. Like other cetaceans, Cuviers use highly developed aural sensory organs to navigate their underwater environment. The whale’s sight, though poorly understood by scientists, is thought to be nearly vestigial. They see as an afterthought. The resulting visual design is stark and monochromatic, forcing players to rely overwhelmingly on the game’s immersive soundscape.

Speculative animation has proven a generative discipline for Rindon Johnson. In his 2021 two-part exhibition Law of Large Numbers, Rindon Johnson presented the digital work Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening (2020-2021), which used climate data and Unreal Engine software to visualize the “North Atlantic cold blob,” a temperature anomaly in the North Atlantic caused by climate change. Data (itself an abstraction dependent on its referents) becomes the poetic link for the artist’s critical investments in virtual reality and the organic world. To Rindon Johnson, this polarity between what we see as virtual and what is considered actual does not exist, and this belief regularly informs his artwork titles and other writings.

By focusing on these waters, Rindon Johnson returns again to the mid-Atlantic triangular trade and his interest in the history of live stock. Shown in the far corner of the gallery, As nearly like the day. (2022) is the newest in Johnson’s ongoing series of durational cowhide works. Using the so-called ‘byproducts’ of our contemporary livestock industry, namely cow leather, the artist exposes his works to both intentional mark-making and the randomizing of natural elements. The animal surfaces become sites for the study of embodiment, elongating his discussions on intimacy, colonial violence, and the complexities of bearing witness. Scholars like Rebecca Giggs point to the evolution of commercial whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries as our initial template for the full scale industrialization of nonhuman animal bodies. Relatively speaking, whales and bovines even share a recent common phylogenetic ancestor. For Rindon Johnson, continuities such as these are ready footholds.

Rindon Johnson (b. 1990, unceded Ohlone and Coast Miwok territories, San Francisco, California) currently lives and works in Berlin where he is an Associate Fellow at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Rindon Johnson is the author of four books of essays and poetry, The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (SculptureCenter/Chisenhale Gallery, 2021), Shade the King (Capricious Press, 2017), No One Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient Press, 2016), and the virtual reality book Meet in the Corner (PublishingHouse.Me, 2017). Recent solo exhibitions include The Law of Large Numbers at SculptureCenter, New York and Chisenhale Gallery, London; and The Valley of the Moon at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. His work has been featured at the New Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the 2022 Whitney Biennial, New York. Alongside Cuvier, Rindon Johnson will release his newest book, Ever Given (Inpatient Press, 2022)—a compilation of his poetic practice over the last four years.

François Ghebaly Gallery

391 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002

ghebaly.com

Emma Woffenden, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Emma Woffenden
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
10 September - 9 October 2004

Emma Woffenden is widely acclaimed as one of Britain‘s most innovative and talented glass artists. Her haunting, enigmatic forms can be reminiscent of transient experiences that hover on the edge of consciousness, such as those which occur between waking and sleep. They are often presented as tableaux or in an installation context, with each autonomous element contributing to the whole. There can be a sense that these presences are on the cusp of transformation - that something vaguely unnerving is about to unfold.

Emma Woffenden employs a full range of glass-working techniques. The forms are variously blown, cast, slumped or fabricated from sheet glass and often combined with other materials. Each work is a distillation of references and her abstract, organic forms, in particular, touch a visceral nerve. These are cast in clear glass, then ground and polished, giving rise to a range of impressions: heaviness and solidity, transparency and magnification, sensuousness and luminosity.

The physical and evocative characteristics of the works are further heightened through her deliberate juxtaposition of opposites, the organic forms contrasting sharply with the more austere representations of man-made objects. The stark, minimal shapes of two faceless grandfather clocks are dark, but reflective. Their deep shadows rhythmically shift from side to side with the pendulum swing of an overhead light bulb, marking the passage of time in eerie silence.

EMMA WOFFENDEN, b. 1962, trained at West Surrey College of Art and Design, 1981-1984, and the Royal College of Art, 1991-1993. Alongside her studio based practice she has collaborated with Tord Boontje on the design and production of the award winning Transglas range of glassware and was curator of the exhibition Solid Air, Crafts Council Gallery, 2001 - 2002.

Examples of her work can be found in numerous public collections including the British Council, Belgium; Ernsting Glass Museum, Germany; Broadfield House Glass Museum; Brighton and Hove Museum; Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Crafts Council. Recent exhibitions (with accompanying publications) include a major solo show at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland (1999), and No Horizon, a series of site-sensitive installations created in response to the architectural spaces of Fabrica, Brighton; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; and Firstsite, The Minories, Colchester 2003 - 2004. Emma Woffenden is represented by Barrett Marsden Gallery.

BARRETT MARSDEN GALLERY
17-18 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DN
www.bmgallery.co.uk

Richard Marquis, Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland

Richard Marquis
Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland
August 4 - September 25, 2004

The Bullseye Connection Gallery presents Richard Marquis, an exhibition of kilnformed and blown glass.

Richard Marquis’s work has a cheeky tone with a teasing, appealing wit. Tina Oldknow, Curator of Modern Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass and author of the definitive Richard Marquis Objects (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997), says “[Marquis’s work is] humorous, but the approach is sophisticated and smart rather than slapstick and stupid. Dick’s work is often about subversion, and it can be particularly charming in its subversiveness. But, sometimes the work is about beauty, such as [his] exquisitely composed and colored collection of murrine eggs in their pristine cups, or it is about pathos, the companion of beauty, which is illustrated by [his] vessel-laden murrine elephant.”

Richard Marquis has a long and well-recognized list of national and international artistic accomplishments. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1990, 1981, 1978, 1974). He will be this year’s recipient of the Libensky Award and is the featured artist of the Chateau Ste. Michelle Meritage Series for 2004. Richard Marquis was also the recipient of the Outstanding Achievement in Glass award from UrbanGlass in New York, NY for 2002. 

Richard Marquis has had numerous international solo and group exhibitions. His work is included in many public and private collections, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Ebeltoft, Denmark; Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY (formerly American Craft Museum); National Art Museum, Auckland, New Zealand; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria; National Glasmuseum, Leerdam, Holland; National Museum of American Art, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

THE BULLSEYE CONNECTION GALLERY
300 NW Thirteenth Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
www.bullseyeconnectiongallery.com

Galia Amsel, Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland

Galia Amsel: Alternative Views
Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland
May 1 - 29, 2004

The Bullseye Connection Gallery presents Alternative Views, an exhibition of Galia Amsel’s contemporary sculptures in kilnformed glass. Alternative Views is a collection from the artist’s recent solo museum exhibition at the Museo de Arte en Vidrio de Alcorcon, Madrid.

Galia Amsel is recognized as one of the best British glass artists of her generation. Her sculptural cast glass works exhibited in solo shows in Britain, France, the USA and now Spain emphasize what the contemporary studio glass authority Dan Klein has called a "geometry of mystery".

Dan Klein’s writing about Galia Amsel’s work describes her ability to contain a world of movement and color in a minimal form: “It is impressive how much varied movement and rhythm [Amsel] manages to achieve from piece to piece within the simple variations of her contained forms and restrained colours. Texture, whether smooth and shiny or with the pitting of lunar landscape is also used to great effect. The different surface textures add sensuality. There is, particularly in her more recent work, a great variety of carefully controlled light and shade, or to describe it in another way, a great variety of moods. The darkness of night and the brightness of day are juxtaposed to create contrast and atmosphere...Her work refers to landscape, to movement, to atmospherics or to a combination of all of these and it manages to convey its message with the utmost simplicity.”

The kilnformed glass medium Galia Amsel uses to achieve her unique depth and colors holds particular challenges. The technical expertise required for working with kiln-cast glass is not that of the glass blower (an athletic exercise), but of the engineer and sometimes the seer: a knowledge of how glass will move within a mold, under high heat, untouched by the artist. Her finished works are generally of tabletop size in basic forms - circles, rectangles, squares that are broken or cut in a way that emphasizes frozen movement, whether it be of man or machine.

“In a sense [Galia Amsel] choreographs movement, capturing a moment of balance that has almost bodily tension,” says Dan Klein. “The rhythm, movements, balance and tension referred to are those of moving parts, whether they be related to the world of humans or the world of machines. ‘I like things that work – machinery, bridges, things that fit together and move, work together,’ she says...Her visual imagery relates to the mechanics of movement. Her work, like the work of skilled photographers, freezes a gestural or operational split second, making one aware of the structural detail of things in motion.” Galia Amsel’s work echoes with both stillness and force, like pieces from a machine whose function is left to the viewer to discern.

THE BULLSEYE CONNECTION GALLERY
300 NW Thirteenth Avenue, Portland, OR 97209
www.bullseyeconnectiongallery.com

Paul Stankard Glass Sculptures at Akron Art Museum - Flowers in Glass: Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard

Flowers in Glass 

Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard

Akron Art Museum

9 November 2002 - 2 February 2003

Akron Art Museum presents Flowers in Glass: Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard. The exhibition features over 60 of the legendary glass artist’s floral paperweights and sculptures. The works are all from the collection of Cleveland area glass collectors Mike and Annie Belkin, who own one of the largest Stankard collections in the world.

Considered to be one of the most important and prolific paperweight artists, Paul Stankard is simultaneously a master glass artist and an astonishing realist sculptor. Throughout his thirty-year career, he has challenged the limits of glass as an art form. His early works focused on uncannily accurate glass flowers, perfect in color and delicate detail. Inside his glass creations, he constructs amazingly minute, highly detailed microcosms of plants and insects. Viewing his work, one is instantly transported to a different time and place—from a meadow of wild flowers to a pond resplendent with water lilies. It is difficult to believe that you are not confronted with nature itself, miniaturized and preserved forever at its peak by crystal-clear glass.

Look more closely, though, and there is even more to these swirls of worlds than the complexity of botany. By experimenting with color and composition, Stankard has achieved his own personal interpretation of nature. Layers of glass create fiction, metaphor and allusion. Some of the flowers, such as the coronet in Coronet, Blueberries and Damselflies, are not even native to nature, but the artist’s fanciful inventions. In a number of the more recent sculptures that Paul Stankard has termed “Botanicals,” tiny root people, words or the female form–which represents the earth spirit–become clear, intermingled among the roots. In commenting on these botanical interpretations, the artist has stated: “I am interested in integrating mysticism, informed by botany, into my work, giving the glass an organic credibility. Through the work, I explore the cycles of nature with wildflowers as a personal metaphor. The addition of tiny root people and word canes as emblems allude to unseen forces of growth and decay.”

Moreover, Paul Stankard has altered the way people view paperweights by changing their very shape. The artist has transformed paperweights from the traditional, round French style (what most people consider when they think of paperweights) to rectangular blocks composed of two or more laminated glass pieces forming one complete scene. In this regard, his paperweights have come to be viewed as sculptures, and Stankard has emerged as one of the most influential glass artists of his time. Indeed, his works are featured in museums throughout the world—from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo, Japan.

Paul Stankard does not just depict the natural world; he uses art to express his awe at the miracle of nature and to hint at the unknowable wonders lying beneath the world’s visible surface. The artist himself has noted: “My work is my prayer,” and his stunning sculptures express this spiritual component silently through form and color. Come to Flowers in Glass and delight the eyes, the intellect and the soul!

Flowers in Glass is organized by the Akron Art Museum from the collection of Mike and Annie Belkin.

AKRON ART MUSEUM

70 East Market Street, Akron, Ohio 44308

www.akronartmuseum.org