Radiant Geometries: Fifteen International Jewelers Exhibition Date: May 18 to September 2, 2001
NEW YORK - The work of fifteen distinguished jewelry artists - including architects and sculptors from the United States and Europe - will be featured in a stunning exhibition that opens May 18 at the Museum of Arts & Design. The 75 pieces to be displayed represent several decades of work by artists working independently in different countries, but with the challenge of balancing form, material, texture and light through geometric relationships.
"This milestone exhibition brings together for the first time world-renowned master jewelers who have independently arrived at an aesthetic vision that unites them all," says Holly Hotchner, Director of the Museum of Arts & Design. "Their transcendent work makes a vital contribution to the field of contemporary jewelry and advances its position as an independent art form. The Museum of Arts & Design, whose permanent collection includes some of the finest examples of jewelry from the twentieth century and today, is pleased to be in the forefront of museums collecting and exhibiting jewelry."
Each artist is represented by five works. Participating jewelers include three celebrated members of the famous Istituto d'Arte Pietro Selvatico in Padua, Italy - Giampaolo Babetto, Francesco Pavan and Graziano Visintin - as well as Michael Becker and Rudolf Bott (Germany), Onno Boekhoudt (Holland), Helfried Kodré, Fritz Maierhofer, Manfred Nisslmüller, and Peter Skubic (Austria), Anton Cepka (Slovakia), Pavel Opocensky (Czech Republic), David Watkins (England), and Eva Eisler and Thomas Gentille (United States).
While some of these artists use precious metals and classical goldsmith's techniques to execute their abstract forms, many feature non-precious and industrial materials - stainless steel, aluminum, plate glass, acrylics and new synthetics - to create strikingly original compositions based on the dynamics of form and space. By purging their works of any figuration, narrative content or obvious social commentary, these artists create meticulously crafted works that are at once revelatory and timeless.
Ursula Ilse-Neuman, curator of the exhibition, says, "These works eschew ostentation - there are no overused, superficial elements of design, nothing shrill or shocking begging for attention. Nevertheless, their skillful interplay of material, line and surface rewards the viewer with works that are full of creative energy and formal brilliance."
In recent decades, Ilse-Neuman notes, "jewelry has undergone an unprecedented revolution and established itself as a separate, powerful voice that crosses the boundaries between craft, design, architecture and art. The works included in Radiant Geometries are unequalled in their lively dialogue between material, form and workmanship. While respecting the traditions of meticulous craftsmanship inherent in the best of the goldsmith's art, these artists make striking individual statements within the strict parameters of their formalist design vocabulary."
The inventiveness of their compositions reveals the artists' unique talents to stimulate the eye as well as the intellect, Ilse-Neuman explained. In addition to their wearability, the thread that unites the diversity of approaches in Radiant Geometries is the artists' fascination with forms that reflect the inner harmony of an underlying geometry, both as they exist in space and as they relate to the human body, she said. In their reduction of forms to their purest elements, the works convey a timeless beauty while they emphasize once again the sense that less can indeed be more.
The installation, designed by participating artist and architect Eva Eisler, complements the clarity and minimalist approach of this group of avant-garde objects. An accompanying catalogue, published by the Museum of Arts & Design, will be available at the opening.