August 2023, Part 2
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: Gallery Viceversa, Lausanne, Switzerland
Contact: ilona Schwippel (click name for email)
Artist: Lucy Pearl Petts (UK)
Retail price: 480 CHF, plus shipping
Lucy Pearl Petts describes her/their work as a response to the chaotic and alarming experiences faced by people living through the Anthropocene, “such as the climate apocalypse, unjust governments, and civil unrest,” says the maker. “The pieces aim to initiate vital conversations of positive reform or provide comfort to the wearer with their inviting iridescent colours, alluring forms, and hidden ornamentation. Petts wants the pieces to adorn the body on an oversized and large scale but without the heavy weight, they select materials to adhere to these forms and ideas, with wearable practicality considered. Petts’s practice draws inspiration from both analogue and digital design methods alongside maximalist Queer aesthetics.”
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: €400, plus shipping
Tore Svensson, born in 1948 in Alfta, Sweden, studied first at the art school in Gävle and graduated in 1978 at 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 presented 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: 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: Ryungjae Jung
Retail price: CAN$450
In stark contrast to the fluidity of his previous collection, Ryungjae Jung has created a series of loose balls enclosed in square structures all exactly the same size. However, keeping the idea of the movement of these balls within a precise space, their quantity varies for each brooch. While wearing them, a slight noise settles in when they collide as we move, making us aware of their, and our, presence.
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: Four Gallery, Gothenburg, 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: €220
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: 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: Museum of Craft and Design, Museum Store, San Francisco
Contact: Elizabeth Shypertt (click name for email)
Artist: Maia Leppo
Retail price: US $650
Maia Leppo is inspired by botanical elements, abstracted and simplified to their most basic shapes. She designs much of her work on a 3-D rendering computer program and has used steel, steel tubing, and 24-karat gold to create the finished piece of work. She is interested in scale, volume, movement, and repetition.
Gallery: Baltimore Jewelry Center, Baltimore, MD, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Allison Gulick (click name for email)
Artist: Katie O’Keefe
Retail price: US$325
Katie O’Keefe grew up in Hudson Valley, NY. From a young age, she has dealt with chronic Lyme disease, and her experience with this illness has greatly impacted her work. When Lyme temporarily limited her dexterity, she shifted her practice, discovering the sensuality of working with thread. O’Keefe received her BFA in fiber arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She recently completed a one-month emerging artist residency at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, where she explored the interconnection between metalsmithing and embroidery, reimagining the thread and fabric cuttings from her large-scale figurative embroideries in her Viscera series.
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$250
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.
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$350
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: Pistachios Contemporary Art Jewelry, Chicago, IL, US (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Pistachios Team (click for email)
Artist: Sandra Salaices
Retail price: US$695
With a bit of playful asymmetry, these lengthy geometric earrings are made with stainless steel and enamel. Despite being large in size, these earrings are deceivingly lightweight. Pair them with an all-black ensemble for an edgy look.
Gallery: Zu design, Adelaide, Australia (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Jane Bowden (click for email)
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: 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: Fingers Gallery Auckland, New Zealand (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Lisa Higgins (click name for email)
Artist: Manon Van Kouswijk
Retail price: NZ$400–$450
Manon Van Kouswijk likes to think that it’s possible to reinvent jewelry, despite the fact that its archetypal forms and motifs haven’t fundamentally changed throughout its long history. She views these archetypes as templates that she uses for her translations of the jewelry types she works from (for example, the beaded necklace). The traces of the making process are often visible in Van Kouswijk’s work. The imperfection of the handmade, present in the marks of fingerprints and molds, is an integral part of the objects. While originating from a conceptual approach to making, at the same time her works embrace the sensual qualities of jewelry objects in the use of color, and their weight, sound, rhythm, and material expression.
Gallery: mahnaz collection, New York City
Contact: noelle wiegand
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: Galeria Reverso, Lisbon, Portugal (click the gallery name to link to the website)
Contact: Paula Crespo (click gallerist’s name for email)
Artist: Myung Urso
Retail price: €1,100
The Wish series takes up the notion of transcendence, derived from Myung Urso’s personal and emotional expression about her spiritual desire to be more open to the energy of nature, earth, sky, air, and the universe. She soldered structures in sterling silver wire to make the wing shapes, then she hand-sewed cotton fabric over the forms, and, finally, applied pigment or ink mixed with lacquer to the surfaces.
