January 2024, 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 its website)
Contact: Noelle Wiegand (click the name for the email address)
Artist: Carmen Tapia
Retail price: US$950
Mexican silversmith Carmen Tapia comes from a long line of jewelers from Taxco, Mexico. Tapia’s work is divided across two categories: exploration of form and use of text. She enjoys working with her hands, manipulating the metal, and using materials like wax and paper that she can easily form. She likes that her jewels can literally be read, the texts magnified by the optical refraction caused by carved quartz or glass. In addition to being a celebrated jeweler, Tapia is also a professor at the Faculty of Arts and Design of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Gallery: Fingers Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Lisa Higgins (click the name for the email address)
Artist: Jack Vogelesang
Retail price: NZ$835
After years of carving stone, Jack Vogelesang now searches for forms that are only possible with modern technology, patience, and curiosity. His work is driven by form exploration, often to find retrospectively that these forms take the shape of a subconscious trying to speak—a three-dimensional journal. Vogelesang graduated from Whitireia with a BAA in 2018. Exhibited in Talente 2019 and from 2017 to the present day, he has worked alongside world-renowned stone carver Joe Sheehan in his Wellington-based workshop, in New Zealand.
Gallery: Gallery Loupe, Montclair, NJ, US (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Patti Bleicher (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Esther Knobel
Retail price: US$400
Israeli artist Esther Knobel is a highly original thinker, investigator, and maker, strongly motivated by, and attached to, such themes as family and nationality. She is especially sensitive to the power and importance of making, craftsmanship, and artisanal skills—the interaction between head and hand, the skilled worker and society, all topics she addresses in her book, The Mind in the Hand (2007). Knobel works with multiple materials in numerous processes, including assemblage, enamels, electroforming, and textile techniques—such as knitting and embroidery with metal wire—and object repurposing.
Gallery: Platina Stockholm AB, Stockholm, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Sofia Björkman (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Helena Sandström
Retail price: US$1,600
Helena Sandström is a jewelry artist from Stockholm. She often explores metals that have limitations. This necklace is made in titanium, with connections of gold. It is difficult to solder titanium in the usual way. Instead, Sandström creates volume from the flat sheet by sawing and folding and looks for the natural beauty in each material. As an artist-in-residence in Japan, she got inspired by origami, which she uses in her own artistic way.
Gallery: Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, CA, US (click the name to link to its website)
Contact: Ken Irish (click the name for the email address)
Artist: Morgan Hill
Retail price: US$170
These fun, colorful, and lightweight earrings are made of holly wood, paint, and steel, with sterling silver posts. Morgan Hill is a sculptor and jewelry designer whose work draws on a wide range of aesthetic and conceptual influences, from 90s pop culture, cult films, and costume design to her Southern, Christian upbringing and experiences as the only female child in an extended family of farmers in Arkansas.
Gallery: Galeria Reverso, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Paula Crespo (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Manuel Vilhena
Retail price: €2,780
This necklace, commemorating 25 years of Galerie Reverso, does exactly what it proposes. Twenty-five juniper-wood houses represent the 25 years of doors open to the public. The colors were picked from a design brief and chosen to match the artist’s aesthetic preferences. It also smells nice …
Gallery: Pistachios Contemporary Art Jewelry, Chicago, IL, US (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: The Pistachios Team (click the name for the email address)
Artist: Brooke Marks-Swanson
Retail price: US$1,595
This statement necklace resembles woven fabric, despite being made with sterling silver and 18-karat gold. Brooke Marks-Swanson elaborates, “My most recent studio obsession is utilizing twisted silver wire, similar to the way yarn fibers twist when made, and soldering it with fine 18-karat gold. This painstaking process is completely done by hand. With each gold connection, the spiral form grows. Through purposeful parameters, these pieces speak of tactility, connectedness, time, patience, and place.”
Gallery: Galeria Tereza Seabra, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Tereza Seabra (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Karin Seufert
Retail price: €300, plus shipping
“What are the properties of a void?” asks Karin Seufert. “What defines and creates a void? How to define emptiness? And is an empty space automatically a void? It is these questions that make up the theme I am working on. If you consider a void a space, then it has a close connection to architecture. The pendants, one of the results of my research, are hollow shapes that might guide one’s associations to rooms, buildings, roofs, or to parts of architecture in general. With their fragile walls, they create voids.”
Gallery: Aaron Faber Gallery, New York City (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Patricia Kiley Faber (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Stefania Lucchetta
Retail price: US$1,100
Stefania Lucchetta is a celebrated Italian metal artist whose work explores design, modern technology, and innovative materials.
Gallery: Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h, bijoux et objets contemporains, Montreal, Canada (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Noel Guyomarc’h (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Sophie Hanagarth
Retail price: €1,600
Originally from Switzerland, Sophie Hanagarth is a contemporary jewelry artist living and working in France. The objective of this work is to approach metal—here, iron—as something carnal, but with finesse and elegance, by creating ambiguous objects that defy the codes of jewelry.
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center, Baltimore, MD, US (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Allison Gulick (click the name for the email address)
Artist: Suyu Chen
Retail price: US$350
Suyu Chen was born and raised in Guangzhou, China. She is currently living in Rochester, NY, US, making jewelry and other stuff. Chen received her MFA in fine arts, jewelry and metals from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2020. She has a post-baccalaureate degree in jewelry + metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BA in decorative arts and design from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou, China. For the month of January, Chen was a resident artist at the Baltimore Jewelry Center.
Gallery: Four Gallery, Gothenburg, Sweden (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Karin Roy Andersson (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Yaiza Rodríguez
Retail price: €500
What’s that? How do you use it? How does it feel to touch, and to hold? Does it smell? Yaiza Rodriguez’s works arouse curiosity. They lure you in with promises that you will get to know their secrets if you get close enough. The jewelry is about bodies, fears, and taboos, but also about intimacy and vulnerability.
Gallery: Zu design, Adelaide, Australia (click the gallery name to link to its website)
Contact: Jane Bowden (click the gallerist’s name for the email address)
Artist: Anja Jagsch
Retail price: AUS$185
Anja Jagsch has an approach to making which is very intuitive. “I love the wabi sabi of these earrings,” says gallerist Jane Bowden, “their shape being dictated by the gentle folding of the copper mesh, which is used as a surface for enameling with carefully selected colors that are subtly blended.”
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