Exhibition Reviews

AJF commissions various kinds of critical writing, including reviews of exhibitions of contemporary art jewelry and related practices from around the world.

21 May 2013

A Künzli for Our Time?

It is curiously hard to get a fix on Künzli’s body of work. He turns up in lots of books, but it is always a partial representation and usually tied to the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s when the conceptual trend in contemporary jewelry really takes off. So, my interest in this exhibition is partly about my desire to see a lot of Künzli’s work and get an impression of his practice over four decades, and partly because I am deeply interested to see how his jewelry is tied to this moment. To state it baldly, I want to know if this exhibition will give us a Künzli for our time or a Künzli oriented to the heyday of conceptual and expressionist art jewelry. more...
03 May 2013

Schmuck 2013: Visual Archive

A visual guide to Schmuck... more...
25 April 2013

Beginning Middle Endless

Heather White is quite adamant that her choice to include collaborative pairs made up of one American and one European was not calculated to comment on the relationship between American and European jewelry, but it is an unavoidable consequence of the format of the show. While walking around the room, I found myself trying to parse out the American work from the European work. It was delightful how often I was wrong. Content or material choices varied considerably within each group of students, foiling my expectations. more...
27 March 2013

Paul Mergen: A Life in Copper

Paul Mergen refers to copper as “the mother metal.” From his early career, he used copper subversively, as a low material, perhaps precluding himself from early recognition. The premier works of Mergen’s early jewelry combined forging, repoussé, and piercing to achieve contrast in form, visual weight, and texture. These are archetypal works for their time, and it is from this origin—at the center of the coalescing American metalsmithing academy—that Mergen departs, moving toward esoteric interests and developing his artistic inquiry. more...
15 March 2013

Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way

Typical of Othoniel’s duality of purpose, these necklaces encompass both joy and suffering. They link people, like beads, in an intimate, shared experience of giving and receiving. Regarding necklaces as a human surrogate, Othoniel has stated, “The necklace is like the shadow of a missing person.” more...
26 February 2013

in Sight series / From the Coolest Corner

FTCC is the third Nordic jewelry exhibition in a row, but it is the first one that puts Nordic jewelry on the world map of contemporary jewelry. It is also the first one that has liberated itself from the Nordic paradigm, for better or for worse. more...
17 February 2013

in Sight series / From the Coolest Corner

I don’t believe that many artists today, at least not in this part of the world, are interested in expressing national or regional identity for its own sake. For someone from another part of the world however, a touch of formal regionalism in the work—whether real or imagined—might seem attractive even if it does not reflect the intentions of the artists. more...
10 February 2013

in Sight series / From the Coolest Corner

The touring exhibition From the Coolest Corner not only took the temperature of where Nordic artists stand on the global scene, it also debated where we stand as a field during the two-day symposium in Oslo, Norway. Is there a typical Nordic style? What do we mean by identity? Is contemporary jewelry a dying field? more...