Two potters, fifty years and two continents apart, both treating the surface of the vessel as something to be marked rather than smoothed.
IF YOU LIKE
LUCIE RIE
Vienna-born, London-based. Rie threw alone from a small mews studio for nearly sixty years, raking sgraffito lines through pitted glazes so the clay beneath could speak. Held by the Met, MoMA and the V&A.
Lucie Rie, Pot, c. 1970s. Stoneware, pitted grey glaze with manganese speckle and diagonal sgraffito. $14,000 at Graham Shay 1857, New York.
One wheel, one London studio, the better part of a lifetime. The pots are scarce because a single person made them, slowly, for decades.
Image courtesy Graham Shay 1857 via Artsy.
YOU WILL LOVE
ANDILE DYALVANE
Cape Town and Ngobozana, Eastern Cape. Dyalvane coils his vessels by hand from river clay and carves them with marks drawn from the Xhosa practice of scarification. Held by the Met, the Studio Museum and Vitra.
Andile Dyalvane, vessel from OoNomathotholo: Ancestral Whispers, Friedman Benda, 2024.
River clay, hand-coiled, scarified, fired in Cape Town. There is no online cart and no seasonal release. You inquire, and you wait.
Image courtesy Friedman Benda, New York.
Lucie Rie scored her glazes from a small London studio; Andile Dyalvane, half a century later in Cape Town, cuts into the clay itself.
IF YOU LIKE
LUCIE RIE
Lucie Rie, Pot, c. 1970s. Stoneware, pitted grey glaze with manganese speckle and diagonal sgraffito. Available through Graham Shay 1857, New York.
Sgraffito and pitted glaze by a Viennese modernist who reshaped British studio pottery.
Image courtesy Graham Shay 1857 via Artsy.
THEN CHECK OUT
ANDILE DYALVANE
Andile Dyalvane, vessel from OoNomathotholo: Ancestral Whispers, 2024. Hand-coiled stoneware, scarified surface, glazed interior. Friedman Benda, New York.
Hand-coiled clay rooted in Xhosa heritage. A leading voice in contemporary South African ceramics.
Image courtesy Friedman Benda, New York.
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