MUSEUM WORTHY
Artist: Bettina Speckner
Gallery: Galerie Rob Koudijs
Contact: Rob Koudijs
Retail: €3,250
This time, Bettina Speckner has crossed the line between nature and culture: she produced the coral for her latest brooches herself on her workbench. It was sculpted from a sheet of lightweight aluminum; a perfect—convincing—merger with an industrial product. In these jewelry pieces, the sea is lovingly embraced by the coral, the mountainscapes and other views seem almost overgrown by red branches. With this work, it feels as if Speckner wants to return the natural to nature.
MUSEUM WORTHY
Artist: Caroline Broadhead
Gallery: Gallery S O
Contact: Katharina Dettar
Retail: US$4,750
Caroline Broadhead has had a lifelong interest in things that change—with objects that can have two identities or perform two tasks. The change will often involve a tactile element, centered on how you handle and get to know a piece. Extra Large Pearls is woven out of glass beads that illustrate pearl jewelry. It can be stretched out and worn around the neck.
MUSEUM WORTHY
Artist: Koen Jacobs
Gallery: Four
Contact: Karin Roy Andersson
Retail: €1,000
Koen Jacobs’s latest work deals with how people have lost their innate connection to nature. The poems of the Roman poet Ovid describe how the harmony between men and nature was disturbed by gods pursuing earthly desires. The longing to get back in harmony was symbolized by hybrids between men and nature, such as centaurs and fauns, and these figures are also seen in Jacobs’s Metamorphoses.
MUSEUM WORTHY
Artist: Herman Hermsen
Gallery: Galerie Spektrum
Contact: Jürgen Eickhoff
Retail: €1,450
Herman Hermsen, born in 1953, was professor of jewelry and product design at the University for Applied Science and Art in Düsseldorf. The “vase with chain” is a perfect combination—a work of art that’s decorative both in the living quarters and on the human body. You can use the vase for flowers as a wonderful piece of art in your living space and wear the chain.
MUSEUM WORTHY
Artist: Typhaine le Monnier
Gallery: Galerie Door
Contact: Doreen Timmers
Retail: €555
Typhaine le Monnier made a group of necklaces—lines, Bauhaus-style—titled NÓ: Knot a Decorative Complication. These works are apparently simple, trying to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum resources, the maximum effectiveness with the minimum effort, and the maximum presence with the minimum screaming. “These objects do not illustrate concepts,” says le Monnier. “They didn’t begin with an idea, but rather my desire to make and think with my hands. This series of pieces underlines my desire to work with simple elements, and willingness to formalize the instant of explorations and playfulness. Revealing the simplified approach that characterizes my practice, side by side with abstract geometric exercises.”
ESTABLISHED ARTIST
Artist: John Iversen
Gallery: Ornamentum
Contact: Stefan Friedemann
Retail: US$1,250
The leaf pin is a theme that John Iversen has been known for, spanning years. His sensitive attention to detail lends each unique specimen an incredibly naturalistic impression, while it remains (on close inspection, at least) recognizably metal. Every collection should have at least one of these beauties. This example was recently featured in the Fuller Museum’s 50th-anniversary exhibition, Striking Gold.
ESTABLISHED ARTIST
Artist: Julia Maria Künnap
Gallery: Platina Stockholm
Contact: Sofia Björkman
Retail: US$3,600
Julia Maria Künnaps’s work is like a binding agent that glues shut the gap between the instantaneous and the infinite. Künnap uses time-consuming, labor-intensive, and extreme techniques to create jewelry that resembles random snapshots of constantly changing material. This pair of earrings belongs to her brush strokes series, for which she was awarded the prestigious Herbert Hofmann prize in 2018, pieces of which are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, in NYC. The design is based on the most minimal form of composition—a single line on a paper, like the very first task Künnap was given at the art academy 20 years ago, but now carried out in a gemstone.
ESTABLISHED ARTIST
Artist: Jamie Bennett
Gallery: Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h
Contact: Noel Guyomarc’h
Retail: US$2,900
Living in Stone Ridge, NY, USA, Jamie Bennett is professor emeritus in the art department at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His work was the subject of a museum retrospective that traveled the US from 2008–2010. Bennett has work in the collection of over 25 museums internationally. In 2009, the American Crafts Council awarded him as an Eileen Webb Fellow of the Council. In 2011 he was awarded his third New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
The title Janus is taken from the Roman god, who had the ability to look back to the past and see the future. His image had two faces looking in both directions. The artist’s work has always been driven by history, both of jewelry specifically and systems of ornamentation more broadly. This piece is from a series of recent works.
ESTABLISHED ARTIST
Artist: Gerd Rothmann
Gallery: Galerie Biró
Contact: Kinga Zobel
Retail: €4,000
Gerd Rothmann’s new works are like the tender touch of white, yellow, light red, and blue petals that have fallen down on the body as if by chance. These works are completely new but, as always with Rothmann, they’re deeply familiar to us without ever repeating themselves.
ESTABLISHED ARTIST
Artist: Lynn Kelly
Gallery: Fingers Gallery
Contact: Lisa Higgins
Retail: NZ$620
“I begin with the idea and then try to find the best material to interpret it,” said Lynn Kelly in a 2013 interview with AJF. HFT tubing is an industrial product not normally associated with jewelry. In her latest exhibition, Unfurl, Kelly sensitively manipulates this material to capture the movement and beauty of growth. The historical use of plants to inform jewelry is rich and deep, and Unfurl continues Kelly’s ongoing personal examination of the botanical. Each work is an exquisite specimen of native flora—unique emblems of New Zealand. Kelly is based in Christchurch and has been making since 1988. Her jewelry can be found in many public and private collections, including Te Papa Tongarewa and the Dowse Art Museum New Zealand.
ESTABLISHED ARTIST
Artist: Karin Roy Andersson
Gallery: Galerie Elsa Vanier
Contact: Elsa Vanier
Retail: €3,990
“When I started sewing my irregular plastic scales into circles,” says Karin Roy Andersson, “the shapes they formed made me think of the curious stone pieces I sometimes found in the sea stacks when I visited my grand father in Öland [an island off Sweden]. Fossils are a kind of petrified memory of past worlds. What in our time will be saved, and in what form will it be passed on to the future? For example, what will happen to all the plastic rubbish? In 10,000 years—will some of it live on as stone images in a marble floor?”
MID-CAREER ARTIST
Artist: Raluca Buzura
Gallery: Sculpture To Wear
Contact: Lisa M. Berman
Retail: US$1,450
Raluca Buzura repositions porcelain into a wearable object. The fragility of porcelain, combined with the feminine image portraying a golden-flecked wing, sparks an ideal of both freedom and hope. Each porcelain piece is hand-cut and sculpted and cured in a kiln. The artist then hand-stitches the individual elements onto the faux leather back for stability in a graceful and meaningful pattern that sweeps around and up the neck. Both wearable and wonderful! Sculpture To Wear showed Buzura’s work at the Laguna Art Museum in December 2019.
EMERGING ARTIST
Artist: Lydia Martin
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center
Contact: Shane Prada
Retail: US$425
Lydia Martin is a contemporary jeweler living and working in Baltimore, MD, US. Her work, based in process and material skill, is an investigation of intentions and consequences. She received an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2017, and a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Martin has exhibited both nationally and internationally. She’s currently represented by Jewelers’ Werk Galerie, in Washington, DC. In her most recent series of work, created during her three-month residency at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, Martin explored technique, form, and surface application. In this brooch, she asks the silver to move in ways that its rigidity might not allow.
GALLERY CHOICE
Artist: Catarina Silva
Gallery: Galeria Tereza Seabra
Contact: Tereza Seabra
Retail: €1,200
The idea of working with beads comes from the ritualistic and contemplative character that is in the making. This work consists of a series of pieces of a votive nature that function as reliquaries where Silva archives memories that she’s been collecting over time. Point by point, pixel by pixel, the artist built imaginary landscapes that seem to already inhabit the memory of the viewer.
GALLERY CHOICE
Artist: Veronika Fabian
Gallery: Galeria Reverso
Contact: Paula Crespo
Retail: €3,550
The Woman necklace is one of the last pieces of the Tattooed necklaces that are part of the series Chains for an Average Woman. With her large metal-chain necklaces, Fabian draws connections between self-identity and female stereotype, exploring how individuality develops against a background of economic and cultural conditions. Chains for an Average Woman is a literal expression of the diverse roles that mass media, and by extension society, encourage in women. The Tattooed necklaces evoke a rebel female figure. The chains are soldered and oxidized with tattoo patterns, including Russian female prison tattoos and images of old-school tattoos.
GALLERY CHOICE
Artist: Takirai Design
Gallery: Archivio Negroni
Contact: Eliana Negroni
Retail: €646
This work marks the meeting between Takirai Design and Archivio Negroni, when the designer couple Yoko Takirai and Pietro Pellitteri took part in the exhibition Gioielli in Fermento in Italy. The essential shape and concept reflect deeply Takirai’s approach to materials and design. The respect of the functional ornament and its absolute fulfilment through ultimate finishing—the extreme polish of iron and the delicate impression on it—are in perfect dialogue with Archivio’s aims, and Archivio wishes to celebrate this fact with this presentation. As the statement for this piece says, “indelible memories.”
GALLERY CHOICE
Artist: Samuel Guillén
Gallery: In the Gallery at Brooklyn Metal Works
Contact: Brian Weissman
Retail: US$4,300
This brooch by Samuel Guillén is from a series of work inspired by travel to Cordoba and Granada. This piece, which evokes natural mineral formations, corals reefs, or embroideries, is created using hollow construction techniques in sterling silver. Guillén constructs each piece out of repetitive patterns and minute elements that grow into accumulations which capture the wonder of nature and the mastery of techniques and materials.
