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UNRIVALLED CUTTING-EDGE CONTEMPORARY ART JEWELRY DEBUTS AT
11TH ANNUAL SCULPTURE OBJECTS & FUNCTIONAL ART FAIR:
SOFA NEW YORK, MAY 29 - JUNE 1, 2008 AT PARK AVENUE ARMORY
OPENING NIGHT PREVIEW, WEDNESDAY, MAY 28

Spotlight on Studio Jewelers Featured in Major Art Museum Shows Dazzling Craftsmanship and Fast-Paced Triple Digit Growth
Matching the Contemporary Art Market

CHICAGO, March 17, 2008—The 11th annual SOFA NEW YORK, long the world’s leading contemporary decorative arts and design fair, opens May 29-June 1, 2008 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. This fair features premier international dealers from 11 countries and over a dozen will represent more than 90 studio jewelers whose work is now exhibited in a fast-growing number of fine art museums nationwide.

Of the 67 SOFA NEW YORK exhibitors, jewelry is represented by the world’s leading dealers including: Ornamentum, Hudson, NY.; Sienna Gallery, Lenox, MA;, Jewelers’ Werk Galerie, Washington, DC.; Charon Kransen Arts, NY.; Aaron Faber Gallery, NY.; The David Collection, Pound Ridge, NY.; Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge; and Clare Beck at Adrian Sassoon, London. Represented art jewelers hail from the U.S., England, Holland, Germany and Japan, and key ones will speak in the SOFA Lecture Series, free with admission.

Giampaolo Babetto
Brooch, 18k gold
Represented by Sienna Gallery,
Lenox, MA

“With the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and other museums acquiring work by artists represented at SOFA, there’s been a sea change of recognition and validation of studio jewelry,” says Mark Lyman, SOFA fair director, who founded the fair in 1994. Additionally, more and more museums are recruiting contemporary jewelry curators, which further heightens the importance of this field in museum circles, academic communities and the art world at large. To further confirm the importance of contemporary jewelry on the international scene, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum’s new jewelry galleries open in May with work reaching back 3,000 years and a staggering one third of their exhibition space is devoted to cutting-edge examples made in the past 20 years.

While the latest crop of museum exhibitions are revolutionizing the way the general public views, understands and appreciates studio jewelry, SOFA, unlike any other fair, offers a unique opportunity for viewing and collecting objects of adornment by pivotal studio jewelers. “Studio jewelry is finally having its day on the museum scene and more sophisticated collectors are taking on contemporary jewelry,” says Claire Beck, of Adrian Sassoon in London. In the past five years, Beck’s sales have shot up more than 200 percent. Museum directors, trustees and patrons are huge part of their clientele, reports Beck. “They see the work of our jewelers as incomparable,” says Beck.

Liv Blåvarp
Nautilus, 2004-2008
Palisander, cocobolo,
dyed maple, whaletooth

Charon Kransen Arts, New York, NY
Also new is the increasing number of contemporary art collectors taking on studio jewelry, say museum curators and dealers alike. “Collectors perceive brooches, necklaces and bracelets as miniature sculptures in precious metals and stones,” says Ursula Ilse-Neuman, Manhattan Museum of Arts & Design jewelry curator. “It becomes very personal to them.”

Dan Jocz
Fire Water Necklace, 2007
16 x 12 x 5″ aluminum, copper, auto body lacquer, chrome
Ornamentum, New York, NY

For example, architects such as Stephen Holl who designed the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, high-priced attorneys and Wall Street tycoons make up the client roster of Stefan Friedermann, who heads up Ornamentum Gallery in Hudson, New York.

“Today’s collectors are drawn to the new materials, innovative forms and revolutionary concepts that a new generation of cutting-edge jewelers have started to pioneer,” says Friedermann. He cites Dan Jocz who works in aluminum, chrome and auto-body lacquer to create necklaces with forms based on Elizabethan collars as securing attention by a broad swathe of collectors. Jocz’s work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland.

Wendy Ramshaw
Strong Rainbow
Set of 9 rings 18 ct. yellow gold Fire Opal, Agate, Apparitite, Rudy, Garnet, Lolite, Tourmaline, Emerald Inlaid Brass Stand
Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, MA

“Now, more than ever, collectors seek the work by jewelers such as Wendy Ramshaw whose examples are endowed with a long lineage of artistry,” says Libby Cooper of the Cambridge, Massachusetts based Mobilia Gallery. Ramshaw, who was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her service to art by the Queen, has created large scale works for Southwark Cathedral and Oxford University. In addition, she is represented in over 70 museum collections.

Adam Paxon
Bangle, 2008
Hand-carved and polished acryllic
Diameter 5 1/2″ (14 cm.)
Clare Beck at Adrian Sassoon, London

SOFA will also feature the work of Adam Paxon, an internationally recognized designer and jeweler from Scotland who won Great Britain’s prestigious Jerwood Applied Arts Prize 2007, on the stand of London dealer Clare Beck. Paxon makes one-off pieces of acrylic and glass jewelry-objects in their own right-which he calls “creatures to wear” in a palette right in sync with contemporary art and fashion. Highly regarded and now acquired by museums such as Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Montreal and the National Museum of Scotland, Paxon will speak in the acclaimed SOFA Lecture Series.

Eva Eisler
Necklace
Stainless steel,
The David Collection, Pound Ridge, NY

Among the jewelers pioneering new ways of using precious stones is Graziano Visintin of Padua, Italy at the David Collection, Pound Ridge, NY. He turns to 18k yellow and white gold with enamel, niello
and gold leaf to achieve dazzling effects. Vistinin’s work can be found in the Paris Musèe des Arts Decoratifs. David says, “I will be presenting a special minimalist exhibition which will include Graziano Visintin, Helfried Kodre, Yu Hirashi and Eva Eisler.” In addition to being a jewelry artist, Eisler trained at the Bauhaus and is very well known internationally for sculpture, drawings, furniture and accessories. David continues, “Not unlike Helfried Kodre and Yu Hirashi, Eva’s jewelry possesses the same formal properties as sculpture while enhancing the human body.”

Kevin Coates
Pectoral Brooch
Carved purple black Opal, Labrodordite, Sunstone, Rainbow Moonstone, 20 ct. yellow Gold with patination, 18 ct. red and yellow Gold and Silver
Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, MA

Then the Cambridge, Massachusetts Mobilia Gallery features a special exhibition devoted to London goldsmith Kevin Coates who has been dubbed Britain’s Leonardo for his highly meticulous creations and multiple talents. At SOFA, this on-site exhibition, A Notebook of Pins comes from The Wallace Collection, in London, where Coates was named Associate Artist. On view will be designs directly inspired by the Collection, such as their Watteau and Fragnonard paintings. Coates is represented in the British Museum and has received commissions from the Prince of Wales as well as the royal families of Saudi Arabia.

Dealers with studio jewelry are an entirely different breed than the standard jewelry retailers. SOFA gallerists are major league players on the international scene. For example, the Dutch-born and Manhattan-based Charon Kransen trained as a jeweler at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts Jerusalem, Israel, as well as institutions in Germany and Norway. In addition, Kransen served as professor of Jewelry at the University of Utrecht Holland as well as at the Art College Amersfoort in Holland. Many SOFA dealers have sold to museums abroad.

What’s different about this jewelry vis à vis antique and retail pieces where the monetary value of precious stones and metals can be paramount, is that studio pieces are conceived and treated as fine art in both concept and ideas emphasized. “Even though craftsmanship remains paramount, it is the ideas that count,” says Ilse-Neuman.

Gerd Rothmann
Mit dem Fingern umschlossen
Silver, hollow, fabricated
3 3/4″d x 1 1/4″
Represented by Ornamentum, Hudson, NY

Gerd Rothmann turns out unique jewelry for a host of collectors. His pieces bear their fingerprints. “There’s an emotional connection between the artist and the collector like no other piece of ornamental art,” says Friedermann. Rothmann’s work can be found in the Museum of Modern Art, Victoria & Albert Museum in London and The Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as museums in Vienna, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. Ornamentum will also showcase Rothmann’s silver vessels as well at SOFA NEW YORK.

Studio Jewelry in Museums Right Now

Two important jewelry collections documenting the evolution of this 60-year development have recently been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and many of the jewelers represented in those museums can be found at SOFA NEW YORK 2008. Plus, museum jewelry exhibitions are popping up all over the country at many other mainstream museums.

• London’s Victoria & Albert Museum opens the William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery this May. This new gallery will house 3,000 jewels from 2,000 B.C. to the present and one third of the holdings on view are contemporary.
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston recently acquired the Daphne Farago collection, and appointed Yvonne Markovitz to be the first curator of jewelry at a U.S. museum. The museum recently exhibited Jewelry by Artists: The Daphne Farago Collection. SOFA fair-goers will get a peek at that extraordinary collection during the lecture by Kelly L’Ecuyer, MFA Boston curator.
• Houston Fine Arts Museum recently secured a major collection from former long-time SOFA dealer Helen Drutt of Philadelphia and their exhibition “Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry” from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection is now showing at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian and will travel to the Mint Museum of Craft + Design and Tacoma Museum of Art.
• Manhattan’s Museum of Arts & Design received a $2 million grant from The Tiffany Foundation to fund The Tiffany & Co. Foundation Jewelry Gallery at their new museum at 2 Columbus Circle, scheduled to open in 2008. Massimo and Leila Vignelli, as well as Kiss+Zwigard Architects designed that articular gallery. MAD appointed Ursula Ilse-Neuman as their contemporary jewelry curator.
• Newark Museum presents Women’s Tales: Four Leading Israeli Jewelers focusing on the careers of four of the country’s leading women jewelers - Bianca Eshel-Gershuni, Vered Kaminski, Esther Knobel, and Deganit Stern Schocken, which opened in March 2008.

Guests in the Sienna Gallery booth
at SOFA NEW YORK 2007

Another significant shift is that this market is no longer a regional niche but going global. Contemporary jewelry is now collected on an increasingly international level and major centers are in Europe, Australia, Japan, and Korea. Friends of Contemporary Jewelry organizations are being organized in those countries.

SOFA NEW YORK 2008 will be presented May 29 – June 1 at the Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 67th. Opening Night Preview, Wednesday, May 28: Invitation-only 5:30 – 9 pm. Exposition hours are Thursday & Friday, May 29 – 30: 11 am – 8 pm; Saturday, May 31: 11 am – 7 pm; Sunday, June 1: Noon – 6 pm. Tickets are $25 for a single day of general admission and $40 for a three-day pass; both include catalog, and will be available on-line. Student, senior and group tickets are available for discounted prices. For general information, visit sofaexpo.com; call 800-563-SOFA (7632) or 773-506-8860; or email info@sofaexpo.com.

Downloadable high-resolution press images are available in the Press Room at www.sofaexpo.com.

Banner image DETAIL: Graziano Visintin, Represented by The David Collection, Pound Ridge, NY

SOFA NEW YORK 2008
MAY 29 - JUNE 1
OPENING NIGHT PREVIEW: MAY 28

General Information:
web: www.sofaexpo.com
email: info@sofaexpo.com
phone: 773.506.8860
phone: 800.563.SOFA (7632)

Media Inquiries:
Marilyn White
Marilyn White Public Relations
973.783.3649
MWhitePR@aol.com