We're currently surrounded by Christmas lights shining and sparkling from the streets, the shops or the houses around us. Yet, if you fancy seeing some arty lights and you happen to be in St. Moritz, you should head to Vito Schnabel (Via Maistra 37, St. Moritz, Switzerland). The gallery opened yesterday (it will be on through February 4, 2018) the exhibition "Dan Flavin, to Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Master Potters".
The event - organized in collaboration with Stephen Flavin, President of the Dan Flavin Estate - is unique since it combines together the art of Dan Flavin, renowned for his work with fluorescent lights, and acclaimed European ceramicists Lucie Rie (1902-1995) and Hans Coper (1920-1981).
Flavin first discovered and began acquiring the work of Rie and Coper at the New York City gallery of fellow artist Hiroshi Sugimoto in the 1980s, recognising the affinities he had with them.
Eminent British potters (though neither was born in the United Kingdom), ceramicist Lucie Rie emigrated from Vienna to London in 1938. Hans Coper fled Germany a year later and started his career as a potter in 1946 as an assistant to Lucie Rie.
Rie was influenced in his work by Modernist architect and designer Josef Hoffmann and his interest in metal and fabric; she based the Spartan shapes of her pieces on classical ceramics - the dateless bowl, vase and pot. Rie experimented with colours such as greens and yellows combined with a metallic bronze and gold rim, but also worked with soft diffusions of colour.
The artist devised abstract decorations such as sgraffito (lines scratched into the glaze with a needle) or inlay (lines cut into the body itself and filled with a contrasting glaze). Rie's preferred practice of raw glazing required the artist to apply slips and glazes one at a time, allowing pots to dry fully between the application of each layer until the clay was ready to be once-fired in an oxidizing kiln. Subtle surfaces were the result of such processes and elaborations.
Hans Coper's pots were less conventional and less colourful than Rie's: Coper used mainly white, brown and black and was inspired by sculpture, being an admirer of Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti. Coper - who coined basic terms for the forms of his vessels (spade, bud, cup, egg, flower and arrow) - would throw his work on the potter's wheel, then alter and assemble pieces by hand to achieve the finished form. As he once explained: "The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process… resonant to my experience of existence now."
The exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery comprises 18 light works from Flavin's two 1990 series dedicated to Rie and Coper, juxtaposed for the occasion with a group of fifteen vessels from Flavin's personal collection of objects by the London-based potters.
Flavin, Rie, and Coper are figures of the twentieth-century postwar avant-garde, they did not adhere to the sculptural tradition, but wanted to explore the aesthetic concerns of their times.
Though the three artists used different mediums, the exhibition tries to explore connections and links between them, looking at the ways they redefined through their art the space surrounding them while investigating issues of materiality, harmony, and permanence.
Flavin employs in his works commercial fluorescent lights, usually considered as impersonal prefabricated industrial objects, but Rie and Coper built their pieces using a simple medium, clay.
Flavin's lights and Rie's ceramic pots are also based on endless variations of certain basic shapes and are characterised by their makers' dedicated reductivism.
Repetition and variation are also the principles behind Flavin, Rie and Coper's works: such notions are reflected in Flavin's series dedicated to the artists and consisting in a single composition of six vertical and six horizontal fluorescent tubes mounted to a wall characterised by a harmonious color converge.
The exhibition invites thefore visitors to consider the similar qualities of two very dissimilar mediums - fluorescent lights and pots - and the dichotomies behind them - timeless medium Vs ephemeral and eternal Vs perishable.
The exhibition could also be interpreted as the story of identity: Rie arrived in the UK as a refugee and had to re-establish herself as a potter, while finding her new identity in a country which didn't seem to have much sympathy for the kind of pots she was making. Coper fled to Britain in 1939 and was interned as an enemy alien and held in Canada for two years. He returned to Britain in 1942 and served as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps. In a nutshell, between fluorescent lights and pottery, visitors will discover more than they expect to in this compact exhibition.
Image credits for this post
1. Installation view, "Dan Flavin, to Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Master Potters", Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery; Photo by Stefan Altenburger.
2."Potato" pot c. 1976; Porcelain, mixed clays beneath a white glaze producing an integral spiral of colour. Photo by Argenis Apolinario © Estate of the Artist Collection of the Estate of Dan Flavin.
3. Angular pot c. 1954; T-material, layered porcelain slips, and manganese. Photo by Argenis Apolinario © Estate of the Artist Collection of the Estate of Dan Flavin.
4. Installation view, "Dan Flavin, to Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Master Potters", Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery; Photo by Stefan Altenburger.
5. Footed bowl c. 1986; Porcelain, golden manganese glaze with a turquoise ring and pink foot. Photo by Argenis Apolinario © Estate of the Artist Collection of the Estate of Dan Flavin.
6. "Spade" form c. 1965; T-material, layered porcelain slips and manganese over a textured body. Photo by Argenis Apolinario © Estate of the Artist Collection of the Estate of Dan Flavin.
7. Lucie Rie in the Albion Mews Studio; c.1952; Source: Rie Archive, Crafts Study Center.
8. Hans Coper in his studio at The Digswell Arts Trust, Hetrfordshire, UK; c.1960. Photograph by Jane Coper.
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