Described by the artist’s biographer Tony Birks as ‘the most original and powerful form of Han’s last years’ Ovid Pot with Vertical Grooves appears for the first time in public since its purchase from the Robert Welch Gallery in Chipping Campden in 1975 - an exhibition that was to be one of the last during the artist’s lifetime. Striking in its understated simplicity the work reflects the pinnacle of a career spent by the artist honing his understanding of form and surface, and the interplay between the two. As Coper himself said in a rare comment on his process in the foreword to his 1969 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition ‘My concern is with extracting essence rather than with experiment and exploration’.

Here we see Coper’s impressive thrown form altered with two vertical indents or grooves – a form closely related to Monumental Ovid Pot, sold at auction in November 2021 from the collection of the late Dr John Driscoll for £651,700 - and a surface that is amongst the best the artist created. Layered with porcelain slips and engobes the artist has worked the body in a manner similar to the painter Frank Auerbach, a process that was incredibly labour intensive, applying and rubbing back. The strong and striking white of the outside is offset by the rich, dark manganese glaze to the interior.

In 1975 the silversmith and designer Robert Welch invited Coper to show a series of new works at his gallery workshop in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. Despite having shown internationally in North America, Japan and on the continent in recent years, this exhibition was to be amongst his most important to date. Made up of thirty recent pots, including ten of his newly evolved ‘cycladic’ forms, the pieces represented the artist working at the very height of his career. As Birks commented on the exhibition:

‘In this breathtaking collection Hans seems to have carried to the ultimate the purity of form he had been seeking for so long. The new pots, though small, seem to concentrate energy and to be denser than anything natural. Hans had pursued Mies van de Rohne’s maxim, Less means More and produced his finest forms.’ (1)

Within the exhibition Ovoid Pot with Vertical Grooves took pride of place, orbited by several of the ‘cycladic’ forms. The work was one of the largest and most ambitious within the show, purchased for the costly sum of £160 by the leading civil engineer Gerhad Jacob Zunz, later Co-Chairman of Arup and best known for his work as chief engineer on the Sydney Opera House. Zunz was no stranger to Coper’s ceramics, having befriended Lucie Rie in the late 1960s he clearly recognised the great architectural and sculptural feat offered in both potters’ work.

In the catalogue for the 2022 Barbican exhibition Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain curator Hilary Floe comments on Coper’s ‘mature language of boldly simplified forms with sensuously weathered, earth-toned surfaces’ (2), and by the mid-1970s Coper had refined this further. Ovid Pot with Vertical Grooves represents the pinnacle of the artist’s career – a career that spanned more than three decades, and established Coper as one of most important and original artists (not just potters) working in Britain at the time.

(1) Tony Birks, Hans Coper, Marston House, Yeovil, 1983, p.71.
(2) Hilary Floe, ‘Surface/Vessel’, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945-65, Barbican, London, 2022, p245