October 2023, Part 1
There are so many reasons to purchase art jewelry…
- Honor a once-in-a-lifetime occasion
- Celebrate that hard-earned promotion
- Commemorate the beginning or end of a relationship
- Pay tribute to a major accomplishment
- Pounce on the perfect piece to round out an aspect of your collection
- Or treat 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 certain to find a fantastic piece you simply can’t live without! (Please contact the gallery directly for inquiries.)
Gallery: Galeria Reverso, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Paula Crespo (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Caroline Broadhead
Retail price: €1,720–€2,250
Inspired by the Portuguese tiles that impressed her during her first visit to Lisbon, in 2021, on the occasion of the 1st Contemporary Jewelry Biennial, Caroline Broadhead has now developed a magnificent beadwork, called RePlace, that respects the scale, colors, and glaze of traditional tiles—now transformed into a movable object, also wearable on the body like jewelry.
Gallery: Thereza Pedrosa Gallery, Asolo, Italy (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Thereza Pedrosa (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Jana Machatová
Retail price: €2,200
In this new body of works created in 2023, Slovak artist Jana Machatová once again showcases her narrative sensibility, aesthetic poetics, and exquisite execution. Each work encapsulates a unique and special narrative for the artist, but at the same time is open to new interpretations by the wearer. Your Words Are like Pearls is simply a poem in a brooch.
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center, Baltimore, Maryland, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Allison Gulick (click the name for email)
Artist: Amelia Toelke
Retail price: US$3,200
Amelia Toelke is a visual artist based in Chatham, NY. She holds a BFA in metal from SUNY New Paltz and an MFA in visual art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Toelke was a one-month mid-career resident with the BJC in the winter of 2023, and this piece is part of a body of work recently on view in her solo exhibition there, Grab Bag. In Grab Bag, Toelke juxtaposes wearable objects alongside works on paper, like this piece, Treasure. Viewed together, charms, chains, and gems are jewelry and symbol simultaneously.
Gallery: Galeria Tereza Seabra, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Tereza Seabra (click the name for email)
Artist: Catarina Silva
Retail price: €1,700, plus shipping
“Memory through images and images that evoke memories,” says Catarina Silva, describing her work. “A collection of celebrations, memories in the shape of candy wrappers, carefully laid out and saved. Rituals. A collection of jewelry that evokes the perishable beauty of memories.” These new pieces by the Portuguese artist were made for her solo show on exhibit at Galeria Tereza Seabra until November 18, 2023. These jewels are a happy combination between traditional art nouveau-inspired jewelry, exquisitely crafted, and the ever-present sense of humor in this artist’s work.
Gallery: Fingers Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Lisa Higgins (click the name for email)
Artist: Pauline Bern
Retail price: Each NZ$140
Pauline Bern is a self-taught jeweler who started making jewelry in the 1970s in the US before returning to Auckland, where she began exhibiting at Fingers Gallery in 1981. She was a lecturer at Unitec Institute of Technology for 24 years and was head of jewelry for 20 of those years. Her work is held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Auckland Museum, and The Dowse Art Museum. Whereas Bern’s early work often referred to the domestic space, her more recent work reflects the rhythms of everyday life and the natural world—the weather, walking, shells on the beach. These pieces are a coming-together of the two realms. Oozing nostalgia, memory, and homeyness, they talk about time spent collecting treasures on the beach and the art of repair using craft skills passed down through the generations.
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: Gabrielle Desmarais
Retail price: CAN$1,175
Gabrielle Desmarais’s work stands out by the singular attention she pays to working with materials—mainly oxidized silver—which she pushes to their limits in order to extract their full expressivity. Each piece of jewelry is imbued with the artist’s gesture. This latest body of work, entitled Le Jardin, is at once dramatic, imposing, and delicate.
Gallery: Funaki (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Katie Scott (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Helen Britton
Retail price: AUS$6,300
Slimy the Snail is the newest in Helen Britton’s ongoing series of Plastic Animals, a series that uses the vintage material galalith alongside gold and diamonds. Galalith was invented in the late 19th century and is considered one of the earliest forms of plastic, though it was made with milk protein. The profligate use of animal product to make decorative baubles—which ended with food rationing in the 1940s—is an idea Britton is acknowledging here. In a sense, she is giving back the material to the animal kingdom. Slimy is one of the most vibrant pieces to date, with drips that move independent of the main form.
Gallery: Mahnaz Collection (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Noelle Wiegand (click name for email)
Artist: Friedrich Becker
Retail price: US$6,850
Friedrich Becker (1922–1997) achieved international acclaim as a goldsmith and is recognized primarily for his innovative work in kinetic jewelry and sculpture. A professor at Düsseldorf’s School of Arts and Crafts, Becker played a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of modernist jewelry design. In the 1950s he introduced the groundbreaking concept of concealed mountings featuring interchangeable gemstones. By the 1960s, this approach paved the way for his exploration of kinetics, introducing the element of movement as the fourth dimension in jewelry design. Becker loved the freedom that designing a ring afforded and used rings as an opportunity to experiment. He wanted rings to be experiential, with the wearer being part of the process and able to switch out the stones on each ring.
Gallery: Pistachios Contemporary Art Jewelry (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: The Pistachios Team (click name for email)
Artist: Eunseok Han
Retail price: US$2,375
Made with recycled aluminum cans, this statement necklace is not only a perfect example of Han’s impressive craftsmanship, but also an environmentally friendly choice for any jewelry lover who cares about the effects of climate change.
Gallery: Platina Stockholm AB, Stockholm, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Sofia Björkman (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Mielle Harvey
Retail price: US$4,700
Mielle Harvey is a multidisciplinary artist who has studied and worked in many places. She moves often but currently resides outside of New York. Her artwork is driven by her investigation of the human relationship to nature. It finds form in various mediums such as jewelry, drawing, and painting. She does tend to probe at the dark side of things and feels that beauty lies in the tension between the lovely and the ugly, or the growth and the decay. The flowers are paintings based on an image from an antique postcard. She thought the blue forget-me-nots on the dark background had such a beautiful yet surreal quality.
Gallery: Four Gallery, Gothenburg, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Karin Roy Andersson (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Deganit Stern Schocken
Retail price: €4,600
The work of Deganit Stern Schocken is in a way the essence of contemporary jewelry: skilled craft combined with a powerful artistic expression. Stern Schocken combines rough, unpolished parts—objects that could have been found in the street and viewed as rubbish—with elegant silvery or strong-colored parts that mirror the rusty steel twins and bring out their colors and details. The work has balance, sensitivity, political edges, and humor—contemporary jewelry at its best!
Gallery: Gallery Viceversa, Lausanne, Switzerland (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: ilona Schwippel (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Bettina Speckner
Retail price: 2’800 CHF
Delving into the soul of old stories, Bettina Speckner is interested in our relationship with images as vectors of memory. Attaching more importance to the lived experience than to the preciousness of materials, the German jeweler transforms memory into jewelry, combining with a completely subjective freedom banal or particular objects that she sublimates into pieces to which she gives a timeless aspect. Sharing with great generosity, she forges the sublime and the profane into a new poetic harmony.
Gallery: Zu design (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Jane Bowden (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Polly Dymond
Retail price: AUS$920
Fools Pearls, by Polly Dymond, was created for Considered—South Australian Living Artists, held at Zu design in 2023. Each maker was invited to create a major piece showcasing their perfected techniques, highlighting the consideration and detail that goes into art jewelry. Dymond’s commitment to reusing polystyrene waste, which she rescues from landfill, provides the start of this series. She experiments and perfects electroforming, pushing this work by adding plastic and glass “gemstones.” The layers of color on the surface are sanded back until Dymond is happy with the finish and the copper layer of electroforming peeks through. The title alone asks the question of what we value. This piece is definitely visually rich!
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