Art Jewelry Forum’s international gallery supporters celebrate and exhibit art jewelry. The 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 have to add to your collection! (Please contact the gallery directly for inquiries.)
Artist: Karin Johansson
Gallery: Galeria Reverso
Contact: Paula Crespo
Retail: €2,600
This is one-of-a-kind necklace made with gold, acrylic, and colored aluminum. In Karin Johansson’s creative process, gravity and balance are always central aspects in the work. With the long anodized-aluminum parts, she has been playing with placement and composition to achieve directions and movement in the pieces. As always when working, a frame is set, base rules of a kind to work from. This time, among other things, three materials and no soldering. By using fewer tools, she achieved more simple solutions to the work and in the long run, an altogether strong visual language.
Artist: Luci Jockel
Gallery: Gallery Loupe
Contact: Patti Bleicher
Retail: US$850
Consisting of freshwater pearls and snake vertebrae, this piece captures the delicate and fleeting impermanence of life.
Artist: Corrado De Meo
Gallery: Thereza Pedrosa Gallery
Contact: Thereza Pedrosa
Retail: €1,170, with free shipping
The artistic research of Corrado De Meo is deeply focused on the study of matter and its infinite possibilities. Following Lavoisier’s fundamental postulate, according to which “Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed,” De Meo focuses his investigation on the continuous evolution of matter. In a year that has proven to be unstable, uncertain, and frightening, De Meo’s work has an incredible message: Each of his brooches reminds us that there is beauty in change, even if it’s unpredictable change. We just need to see it as an opportunity, and change can bring new, breathtaking beauty.
Artist: Gabrielle Desmarais
Gallery: Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h, Bijoux et objets contemporains
Contact: Noel Guyomarc’h
Retail: CAN$760
Gabrielle Desmarais gives us an invitation to discover new spaces. Empty spaces surrounded by silver walls, tubes the end of which are embroidered with glittering hematites. An aerial view of a place that may be familiar, perhaps dreamed of, an industrial space, or even intriguing remains. Desmarais invites us to create our own narrative from her own.
Artist: Felicia Mülbaier
Gallery: Galerie Door
Contact: Doreen Timmers
Retail: €2,170
In her latest series and exhibition titled What’s Left of the Day: Insights, Felicia Mülbaier takes us along her journey across the borders of material. Her art jewelry—or sculptures—originate from lapis lazuli, a gemstone in royal blue. With endless grinding and filing, she transforms the hard, cold stone into a window: fragile, open, and narrative. Gewand is the German title of this piece; translated in English: Garment.
Artist: Aaron Decker
Gallery: Ornamentum
Contact: Stefan Friedemann
Retail: US$2,400
Part of Aaron Decker’s second exhibition with Ornamentum titled it’s (not) all fun and games, the 2-4-6 brooch is a striking example of a new body of work inspired by difficult experiences growing up queer in a military household. Decker skillfully sources and recontextualizes those memories into jewelry. These new enamels combine a deep curiosity for the material and its history in military medals and regalia with the fascination of toys and play to make pieces that come apart and reconfigure into an array of different wearable possibilities. More toy than jewelry, each piece its own micro-narrative with titles such as mace face, cut my teeth, and luke, a flying fish, Decker’s new wearable works are a strong and confident turn in the artist’s practice. Decker earned an MFA in metals at Cranbrook Academy of Art (2015), and his works can be found in many distinguished collections, including the recent acquisition of several pieces by the Enamel Arts Foundation.
Artist: Lisa Walker
Gallery: Fingers Gallery
Contact: Lisa Higgins
Retail: NZ$2,500
Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most influential contemporary jewelers, Lisa Walker has received numerous awards throughout her 30-year career, and her work has been acquired for major public and private collections both in New Zealand and overseas. “I initially saw a music video by Nick Cave called More News from Nowhere. He’s influenced by William Morris’s book News from Nowhere, published in 1890, however I didn’t realize this at the time,” Walker explained last year. “I made associations with the overload and development of news entertainment. And now today, four years after I made this necklace—fake news and conspiracy theories.”
Artist: Malgosia Kalinska
Gallery: Mydaybyday Gallery
Contact: Laura H Aureli
Retail: €850
This month, Mydaybyday Gallery in Rome is featuring the artwork of artist Malgosia Kalinska, Circularity Necklace III, in resin, silver, and silicone. “The circle is a primary form that carries deep, multilayered symbolism in all religions and cultures,” says Kalinska. “It revolves around infinity, the absolute, internal harmony, and spiritual elements. Often it describes perfection, complete unity and great hollowness at the same time. For me it symbolizes the constant renewal of life that emerges from dying nature. The shape of each living cell contains curvatures that originate from the circle.”
Artist: Nathalie Maiello
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center
Contact: Shane Prada
Retail: US$225
Nathalie Maiello’s work is a reflection on the emotional relationship we have to jewelry, its physical and material presence on the body, and the personal sentiments we develop from this exchange/presence. In making her work, Maiello contemplates the perspective of both the person wearing the work and the piece itself—how each influences the other and the transformative nature of the relationship. As a recent one-month artist-in-residence at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, Maiello experimented with making compelling settings for Plexiglas utilizing a combination of hand sawing and a router system she devised with a flexshaft. The resulting pieces are elegant and approachable while also intriguing to examine. Maiello is a contemporary jeweler from Montréal, Québec, Canada. She completed her BFA in jewelry design and metalsmithing at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and is a recent MFA graduate from the metalsmithing and jewelry design program at Indiana University, in Bloomington, IN, US.
Artist: Tove Knuts
Gallery: Four Gallery
Contact: Karin Roy Andersson
Retail: €1,000
The Swedish artist Tove Knuts is known for her soft organic shapes and textile materials, often crocheted in pastel colors. Her work is about value, craft, and traditions. This necklace is the result of a project that started in her deceased father’s workshop. Knuts has used her father’s materials and unfinished pieces, and combined them with her own shapes and colors.
Artist: Hugo Bernardo
Gallery: Galeria Tereza Seabra
Contact: Tereza Seabra
Retail: €430, plus shipping
Says Hugo Bernardo: “The constellation of a visual collage as symbolic expresses the desire to map the world through the metaphor of a miniaturized collection. A gesture of containing the precious essence of things, icons materialize that part of a whole that together composes itself. The act of preserving or crystallizing the memory of life. Such a notion is in fact the intent of the work, the holistic conception that encompasses everything in its inclusive complementarity around its talismanic value. In this way, a dreamlike and improbable dwelling emerges, an imaginary place of comic and allusive gestures. Forms of a game dedicated to an extensive, playful, and inexplicable force.”
Artist: Yong Joo Kim
Gallery: Yun Gee Park Gallery
Contact: Scott Duerstock
Retail: US$6,500
Yong Joo Kim is a pioneer in the use of hook-and-loop fasteners (Velcro) as material for wearable sculpture and installations. This necklace, Varied Degree of Directed Protrusion No. 4, is a powerful and dynamic representation of her work that bridges both genres and is stunning both on the wearer or on display. Kim, an MFA graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, is a Society of Arts and Crafts and NICHE award-winning artist with an extensive record of exhibitions across Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design (NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank (Seoul), and Velcro Group.
Artist: Winfried Krüger
Gallery: Galerie Spektrum
Contact: Jürgen Eickhoff
Retail: €5,250
I love the ironic way Winfried Krüger handles his jewelry. When he uses old packages as forms to cast in metal, or searches in old jewelry shops and fabrication shops for old and slightly used parts, he is giving them a new life. In this brooch, found pieces, cast pieces, and a soft bent sheet of silver all lead to a brooch that also seems to have a bit of a political dimension.
