ART-PRESENTATION: Dan Flavin,to Lucie Rie & Hans Coper,Master Potters
![Dan Flavin, untitled (to Lucie Rie, master potter) 1rrr [Detail], 1990, blue, green, yellow, and pink fluorescent light, 183 cm high, 61 cm deep, © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS)-New York, Image Courtesy Rubin/Spangle Gallery](http://www.dreamideamachine.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/0004.jpg)
When Dan Flavin began collecting the work of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper in the 1980s, he undoubtedly recognized the achievements of kindred spirits. As with his dedication to commercial fluorescent lighting, Lucie Rie and Hans Coper constructed entire radical oeuvres upon the single deceptively ordinary medium of clay. And like Flavin, theu employed repetition and variation to elevate the humble to the level of the sublime.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Vito Schnabel Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Dan Flavin, to Lucie Rie & Hans Coper, master potters” at Vito Schnabel Gallery, has been conceived to explore affinities between three artists who employed dramatically different mediums to establish and redefine space, and to investigate issues of materiality, harmony, and permanence. The exhibition brings together the work of Dan Flavin and acclaimed European ceramicists Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. 18 light works from Dan Flavin’s series “To Lucie Rie, Master Potter” and “To Hans Coper, Master Potter” (both 1990) are on presentation in juxtaposition and dialogue with a group of 15 vessels from his Personal Collection of objects by the London-based potters. Although Lucie Rie and Hans Coper are regarded as the preeminent British potters of the latter half of the 20th Century, neither was born in Britain. Both were refugees from Nazism. In 1938, Lucie Rie fled Nazi Austria and emigrated to England, where she settled in London, During and after the war, she made ceramic buttons and jewellery. Hans Coper was born in Germany, and fled to Britain in 1939. He was interned as an enemy alien, and held in Canada for two years, on return to Britain in 1942, he served as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps. In 1946, Lucie Rie hired Hans Coper, a man with no experience in ceramics, to help her fire the buttons. Although Coper was interested in learning sculpture, she sent him to a potter, who taught him how to make pots on the wheel. Rie and Coper exhibited together in 1948. Coper became a partner in Rie’s studio, where he remained until 1958 when he left to establish his own studio. Lucie Rie’s pots were made of stoneware or porcelain. She did not follow the usual potter’s procedure of bisque-firing the object, applying glaze, and re-firing it. Instead she painted her glazes directly onto the “green” unfired body, firing the piece only once. She experimented with a wide spectrum of colors and her glazes, often softly modulated, ranged from satiny smooth to deeply pitted “volcanic” textures. Applied decoration, when it appeared, was abstract and discreet, used to enhance the piece rather than to call attention to itself. Throughout Hans Coper’s career, his work at the potter’s wheel was what mattered most to him. From the start, his pots were less conventional than Rie’s. He executed them all in stoneware, and he restricted himself to a much more limited range of glazes, eschewing her frequent use of color and relying only on white, buff, brown, and black. He burnished the surface of some of his pots and experimented with textures, scouring the clay or layering glazes and abrading them with scouring pads.
Info: Vito Schnabel Gallery, Via Maistra 37, St. Moritz, Duration: 19/12/17-4/2/18, Days & Hours: Contact the Gallery: t. +41 (0)81 544 76 20, f. +41 (0)81 544 76 25 or mail to: stmoritz@vitoschnabel.com , www.vitoschnabel.com
