May 2012

This month Jewelers’Werk Galerie in Washington DC is showing the work of Iris Boedmer, the German jeweler from Pforzheim. Ellen Reiben has been in the jewelry business a long time. She has had the gallery since 1988 when she took it over from the founder, Dutch jeweler Joke van Ommen. I asked both Ellen and Iris some questions about the gallery and the fabulous work being shown.

Susan Cummins: Ellen, how do you describe what you show?

Ellen Reiben: I show contemporary international jewelry by artists, in a range of materials. What is most important to me is a sense of a clear and original vision that does not feel derivative in concept or implementation. The work must speak of its time (I am not fond of the term ‘timeless’) and I am also very attracted to subtlety. Having been in this field for a long time and having seen so much work, it is still inspiring to me to find new work that is truly provocative and powerful and seems to speak its own ‘language.’ My intuition plays a role in selection – an intuition that has grown and that I now trust, from so many years in this field.

What is your background and what led you to run a gallery showing art jewelry?

Ellen Reiben: I have an MFA in jewelry from Rochester Institute of Technology and I studied with Gary Griffin. My work was mostly in non-precious materials. I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and studied with Fred Fenster. Since then I have done a broad array of exhibition design, theatre props and my own jewelry. Now, however, I focus on my gallery and my daughter, who is fifteen. The gallery was called V O Galerie in 1984 when Joke van Ommen opened it. She was killed in an automobile accident in 1988 and her family asked me to take over. At the time I had my work in her gallery. I changed the name of the gallery for legal reasons and carried on with her goals of bringing international artist jewelers’ work to the United States.

Caroline van Hoek in Brussels, Belgium, has had her gallery for five years. The storefront she occupies was once a grocery store and the original awning still refers to Fruit and Legumes. She has participated in a number of high profile fairs like Design Miami and has tried to expose art jewelry to new audiences. Her show in April 2012 with Ulrich Reithofer, an Austrian living in Amsterdam, presented a full and rich range of his latest work. Ulrich took a while to get back to me with answers to my questions and apologized with a song by F R David called ‘Words Don’t come Easy.’I think you will find that his words might not come easy but they are pretty damn poetic.

Susan Cummins: Please tell me where you went to school and where you are now.

Ulrich Reithofer: I was in a technical college for civil engineering in Austria during the 1990s and in 1998 I entered Fachhochschule Trier, Fachbereich Idar- Oberstein in Germany where I learned gemstone cutting and jewelry design with Theo Smeets. That was followed by two years at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam getting a Master of Applied Arts with Marjan Unger. I am now living and working in Amsterdam.