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until 17.04. | #4607ARTatBerlin | Meyer Riegger shows from 01. March 2025 the Duo-exhibition Hucht Copley, Copley Hucht by the artists Anna Lea Hucht and William N. Copley.
The duo exhibition Hucht Copley, Copley Hucht shows watercolors and ceramic vessels by Anna Lea Hucht (1980) alongside paintings and drawings by William N. Copley (1919-1996). While Hucht’s detailed, often very small-format watercolors almost seem to whisper, Copley’s candy-colored works between Surrealism and Pop Art appear much louder. The exhibition shows how different visual regimes determine the work of the two and how Hucht and Copley meet in their love of ornament.
Eyes and hair – Anna Lea Hucht’s anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures gaze at us with their oversized eyes. Looking at how others look. Observing how hair, or even fur, grows in Hucht’s watercolours – not only on human and animal skin but also on the epidermis of plants and the surfaces of objects.
William N. Copley’s cartoon-like images feature neither eyes nor hair – or they do so only symbolically, in the form of wig-like quiffs atop women’s heads. His drawings and paintings of erotic scenes are populated by faceless men in suits wearing bowler hats – rounded felt hats with a brim – and voluptuous, naked women, onto whose circular buttocks he emblazons his signature, CPLY (pronounced “See-ply”), as seen in Chignon and Nu de Dos (both 1965).
Copley’s highly distinctive and humorous visual language, situated between Surrealism and Pop Art, defies categorisation. With it, he constructs a private mythological universe from the perspective of the ‘male gaze’, a concept art history began to question only in the 1970s. Hucht’s ceramic vessels, by contrast, return the gaze into the physical reality of the exhibition space, making Copley’s viewpoint – and the viewers themselves – the subject of scrutiny. Layers of observation, stacked like Matryoshka dolls.
Hucht’s watercolour Im Dampfbad (2023) depicts a naked figure seen from the rear seated on a marble bench. The sight of skin against stone might evoke a shiver, yet the title indicates that the setting is a warm, humid steam bath. Towels can be glimpsed to the left. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, too, painted nude bodies in bathhouses in the late 19th century, but exclusively female figures with unnaturally smooth, porcelain-white skin. With her furred beings, Hucht blurs the boundaries between animal and human, male and female, reality and imagination. Hair marks transitions in life – in puberty and old age, it appears in unexpected places. Both the exceptionally fine hairs Hucht renders with meticulous precision and the relatively small format of her works invite viewers to step closer. It is as if her paintings whisper.
It would be simplistic to say that, in contrast, Copley’s works shout – but whisper, they certainly do not. Candy-coloured and lascivious, his boldly contoured images expose the repressed desires of a white, heterosexual, Western middle class. Throughout his life, Copley was an “artist’s artist” – little known to the public but widely respected in the art world. When he took up painting at 28, self-taught, he was already a collector, writer, publisher and patron, on the verge of opening a gallery in Beverly Hills exhibiting works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Man Ray, Roberto Matta and Yves Tanguy. In his text “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer”, he wrote about his gallery work: “In 1946, Southern California was a highly unsuitable and certainly superfluous place for the dissemination of Surrealism.” Over its 12-month run, the gallery sold only a handful of paintings, but this did not bother him. He forged close friendships with the Surrealists he exhibited and collected, which also became a subject of his art – the exhibited work Hommage à Magritte (1958) is dedicated to Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte. As Kasper König remarked in an interview with Stephanie Seidel, Copley saw art as something that need not be canonised.1 He took an unacademic approach, delighting in showing, acquiring and supporting artists and fostering connections.
Perhaps it is a shared love of ornamentation – which art historians Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer defined as a prime form of artistic intent – that links Hucht and Copley, albeit for entirely different reasons. Hucht regularly scours antiquarian bookshops, leafs through design catalogues and explores objects and ornaments as historical witnesses and expressions of specific cultural contexts. Copley, on the other hand, uses ornamentation in his paintings to signify interior scenes or to standardise his subjects, formulating them through a modular vocabulary of recurring visual elements. From today’s perspective, his combination of flat, abstract ornamentation with narrative figuration is striking. His patterns emerge from the world of mass production, the repetitive motifs of Andy Warhol, comics or the warmth of a heated car interior. Hucht’s ornamentation, by contrast, as seen in the watercolour Curtain in Transformation (2024), takes on a life of its own – trembling, fluttering, forming a liminal space between inside and out, bristling with hair. The patterned curtain in this watercolour both conceals and gestures towards something. Does something hide behind it? Not necessarily. Perhaps the curtain need not be drawn aside to reveal anything. Perhaps the transition it marks – symbolised by hair – is precisely what Hucht presents to us and her watchful ceramic vessels. As if there were nothing to uncover at all.
Opening: Saturday, 1. March 2025, 11 am to 2 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 1. March until Thursday, 17. April 2025
To the Gallery
Title image caption: Left: Anna Lea Hucht, Trembling curtain, 2023, Aquarell on paper, 40 x 30 cm. Right: William Copley, Chignon, 1965, Emulsion paint on canvas, 160 x 130 cm
Exhibition Anna Lea Hucht & William N. Copley – Meyer Riegger | Contemporary Art – Kunst in Berlin | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
