A matched pair of small studio vases where the glaze does almost all the seduction. The mottled blue-purple surface has pulled back over a white ground in the way that the best West German art pottery of the period does: slightly unstable, very alive, and far better in the hand than in a tidy catalogue photo.

This is the world of West German "fat lava" and studio ceramics from the 1960s and 70s, the makers like Scheurich, Ruscha and Marei who turned thick, reactive glazes into a whole design language. Marei Keramik, from Rheinbach, is a strong candidate here on the glaze and body, though we keep it to "possibly" without a base mark to settle it. Either way the pair belongs firmly to that confident, glaze-led German moment.