Lucie Rie / Hans Coper: Life at the Wheel" at Offer Waterman

Over 200 pieces on loan or for sale, all from private collections normally inaccessible to the public, make up the first major exhibition in almost three decades to bring together the work of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper side-by-side. The journey begins with Rie's earliest known pieces made in Vienna and goes up to the turned pieces from 1990, the year she stopped working, alongside Coper's early explorations with clay—a material he discovered through Rie herself, in her studio at 18 Albion Mews—up to his final, more refined forms created before his untimely death in 1981. Both born outside the UK and forced, as immigrants, to forge their own path within a ceramic scene then dominated by Bernard Leach and his circle, the two artists developed distinct aesthetics but remained linked by their shared history and the twelve years they worked together at Albion Mews—a friendship that endured even after Coper founded his own studio in Digswell and later settled in Frome, Somerset, in 1967. Spread across four rooms of the historic building at 17 St George Street, the former showroom of William Morris & Co., the exhibition is accompanied by a newly published catalog with texts by Tanya Harrod, Nigel Wood, Nigel Slater, Robin Cawdron-Stewart, and Edmund de Waal.