August, Part 1
There are so many reasons to purchase art jewelry…
- Celebrate that hard-earned promotion
- Honor a once-in-a-lifetime occasion
- Pay tribute to a major accomplishment
- Commemorate the beginning of a new relationship or the end of one
- Pounce on the perfect piece to round out an aspect of your collection
- Or invest in a treat for yourself—just because
Art Jewelry Forum’s international gallery supporters celebrate and exhibit art jewelry. Our monthly On Offer series allows this extensive network of international galleries to showcase extraordinary pieces personally selected to tempt and inspire you. Take a look. You’re bound to find a fantastic piece you simply can’t live without! (Please contact the gallery directly for inquiries.)
Gallery: mahnaz collection, New York City (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: noelle wiegand (click name for email)
Artist: Pat Pruitt
Retail price: US$7,500
Pat Pruitt, of Chiricahua Apache and Anglo descent, from Laguna Pueblo, NM, US, breaks boundaries. Pruitt came to jewelry making via the body piercing industry; hence, his work uses implant-grade steel, titanium, and zirconium rather than traditional silver. Known for their unique design sensibility, craftsmanship, and fabrication techniques, Pruitt’s vessels and jewelry combine modern industrial design with specific cultural signifiers—pottery, dentalium shells, and feathers. His work, which has won every major award at key Native American juried shows, resides in the British Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (US), Heard Museum (US), Newark Museum of Art (US), among others, and in numerous private collections.
Gallery: Gallery Loupe Montclair, NJ, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Patti Bleicher (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Caroline Gore
Retail price: US$3,500
Caroline Gore’s jewelry, which usually incorporates black materials, such as oxidized silver, jet, leather, glass, and hematite, often recalls antique formats like the chatelaine—albeit in a most contemporary guise.
Gallery: Fingers Gallery Auckland, New Zealand (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Lisa Higgins (click name for email)
Artist: Warwick Edgington
Retail price: NZ$900
Born in New Zealand, Warwick Edgington now lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Edgington works with the beautiful natural materials associated with New Zealand—pounamu, paua shell, mother-of-pearl, and carnelian from the Coromandel Peninsula, near Auckland, on the North Island. He sets these into unexpected dialogues with metals including silver and forged stainless steel, but also with mirror and black rubber for a contemporary twist on the traditional.
Gallery: Quittenbaum Gallery Munich, Germany (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Nadine Becker (click name for email)
Artist: Herman Hermsen
Retail price: €600 + VAT
Black and white always form a powerful contrast. Hermsen uses this quality and creates a hypnotizing effect through different angles in the bore.
Gallery: Zu design Adelaide, Australia
Contact: Jane Bowden
Artist: Leonie Westbrook
Retail price: From AUS$300 per pair
Leonie Westbrook has an incredible sense of proportion and color. Her dynamic pieces make the perfect addition to your collection. These Peel earrings are light and wearable, and they are sure to become one of your favorites.
Gallery: Pistachios Contemporary Art Jewelry Chicago, IL, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Pistachios Team (click for email)
Artist: Pat Flynn
Retail price: US$11,495
This breathtaking necklace is made with hand-forged iron, 18-karat yellow gold, and diamonds for a bit of sparkle. With curves that naturally follow the neckline, this necklace is incredibly comfortable to wear. Features include a hinge closure and a built-in mechanism to attach Pat Flynn’s pendants. Flynn is collected by many notable figures and institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Gallery: Platina Stockholm Stockholm, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Sofia Björkman (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Karin Roy Andersson
Retail price: US$700
Giving new life to leftovers and packaging—for example, plastic bottles—gives Karin Roy Andersson satisfaction, and she appreciates that the material already carries stories. A constant search for new plastic materials to recycle, and the interplay between her and the qualities of the materials, challenges and motivates the maker. All the plastic makes her wonder what in our time can be saved and in what shape it will be passed on to the future. The bracelet is flexible in size and fits anyone.
Gallery: Funaki Melbourne, Australia (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Katie Scott (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Lisa Walker
Retail price: AUS$6,600
This embroidered work shows how, in some ways, Lisa Walker’s practice has come full circle. It’s careful, neat work, more akin in this spirit to her very earliest metalwork from the Otago Polytechnic days, before the rebelliousness of her post-Munich period. The dresses are disembodied symbols of a certain kind of femininity, untethered from the gendered politic and reduced to simple shapes. Direct to the point of being cryptic, Walker says, “There are a hell of a lot of dress shapes, they could morph. You can pick the era.” Not so much an explanation as a hint and a challenge …
Gallery: Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h, bijoux et objets contemporains Montreal, Canada (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Noel Guyomarc’h (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Niklas Link
Retail price: CAN$1,680
In search of his totem, object, or emblem of a group or individual, Niklas Link began to see animal portraits appear in his creations. Continuing his reflection of questioning, resulting with his self-portraits series, he proposes different new characters.
Gallery: Galeria Reverso Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Paula Crespo (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Aaron Decker
Retail price: €3,200
Aaron Decker’s work explores jewelry as an interplay of component parts through specific formats: demi-parures, lockets, and toys combined with bomb-like figurines. Like people, they are each a combination of smaller selves that reconfigure over time, changing with the wearer. Sometimes a necklace, sometimes a keychain or brooch, these pieces struggle with themselves, like we all do.
Gallery: Four Gallery Gothernburg, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Karin Roy Andersson (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Marianne Schliwinski
Retail price: Each €100
In Marianne Schliwinski’s work, you see contrasts playing together. Her language consists of materials and their different qualities. Things might not always be what they seem—light pieces with a heavy look and weighty works with a light appearance. Schliwinski often combines papier-mâché with found objects. Different paints and lacquers accentuate the materials and shapes. The composition, the materials, and the colors tell sensible, political, and sometimes funny stories.
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center Baltimore, MD, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Allison Gulick (click name for email)
Artist: J Taran Diamond
Retail price: US$400
J Taran Diamond is a metalsmith and interdisciplinary craft artist. They studied and taught at the University of Georgia and hold a BFA from the University of North Texas. Diamond’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in exhibitions at New York City Jewelry Week, Munich Jewelry Week, and the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art, in Gimpo, South Korea. Outside of the studio, Diamond is an advocate for Black people in academia and works to dismantle the systemic barriers that make higher education inaccessible to Black people. They will be joining the Baltimore Jewelry Center as a teaching fellow this fall.
Gallery: In the Gallery at Brooklyn Metal Works Brooklyn, NY, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Brian Weissman (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Patricia Domingues
Retail price: US$3,150
“Through my artistic practice,” states Patricia Domingues, “I have been exploring fracturing movements in both artificial and natural materials. What specifically intrigues me is the tension between intentional acts, such as cutting into the material, and uncontrolled accidents, such as fractures. Through the will to control, the fractures develop and are liberated as the material inevitably cracks in release. The lines, fractures, and cuts visible in my work are always the result of repetitive gestures performed on the material and its responsive language.”
Gallery: Galeria Tereza Seabra Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Tereza Seabra (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Tore Svensson
Retail price: €1,100, plus shipping
Tore Svensson, born in 1948 in Alfta, Sweden, studied first at the art school in Gävle and graduated in 1978 from HDK School of Design and Craft, Gothenburg. From 1989 to 1996, he was lecturer at HDK, and afterward he worked as a professor for two years in the jewelry department. His work includes jewelry and objects and is present in private and public collections, as well as in museums all over the world. He is the recipient of several awards, among others from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the Herbert Hofmann Prize. About his jewelry, the artist says he has “been working the past 20 years within the geometric field … The projects I work with often stretch over a long period of time. A new project often emerges from an ongoing one. The beginning and the end of a project might be difficult to discern. The series consists of small displacements that change expression and content.”
Gallery: Gallery Viceversa, Lausanne, Switzerland
Contact: ilona Schwippel (click name for email)
Artist: Felicia Mülbaier (Germany)
Retail price: 2’100 CHF
“A very special process takes place during the dialogue with the material,” says Felicia Mülbaier. “I call this process lingering; it means pausing between two situations, between two activities. While lingering, there is no urge to create. It is rather that something stays behind, and when I explore it, something opens up inside of me. During the process, I make many conscious and unconscious decisions that result from the time of observation. My own ideas connect with the possibilities unfolding through the material. Stone contains information about its origin, about the time it took to appear on the surface of the earth, and how it found its way into my workshop.”
