2023-04-23 20:13:39
MOzartkugeln, Kaiserschmarrn or Sachertorte are typical associations that pop up when people think of Austria. But the neighboring country has more to offer, for example jewelry that is made with a will, as an exhibition in the German Goldsmiths’ House in Hanau shows.
Objects by 53 female artists can be seen in the Silver Hall of the Jewelery Museum until July 2nd. Jewelry from Austria. Female Artists in Focus” give an overview of jewelery making since the 1970s. Particular attention is paid to the early days of avant-garde jewelry, which is related to works by the middle and young generation, as museum director Christianne Weber-Stöber explains.
According to her, the exhibition should show the diverse developments of an exciting and heterogeneous jewelry scene, as it has developed in Austria. This includes the so-called author’s jewellery, which established itself internationally as an art form at the end of the 1960s. He defines himself through the use of unusual materials and techniques and tries to take up the social, cultural and aesthetic developments of the time. Away from the purely decorative, pieces of jewelry become independent and idiosyncratic objects, as Weber-Stöber says.
Colorful crawling animals made of plastic stones
Under the title “Defensive Response. Heart” the artist Brigitte Lang creates a necklace in the early 1980s, the tip of which points like an arrow to the wearer’s chest. The jewelry interacts with the wearer’s body. Another feminist position is shown by the contemporary artist Anna Riess, who ironically took up the obsession with optimizing the female body with her object “Bacon Belt” from 2018, as the museum director explains. The wide strap made of aluminium, leather, silver, fabric and sheep’s wool is reminiscent of a wide bacon rind and can be strapped around the stomach.
Jewelry exhibition “With obstinacy – jewelry from Austria. Artists in focus” in the Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus in Hanau.
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Image: Sandra sentinel
In the 2014 series “The Controlled Chaos” Stephanie Morawetz works with colorful plastic stones. These are processed into colorful crawling animals, or they illustrate the artist’s depressing idea that the earth will one day be covered with small plastic particles that solidify into stones after being deposited. According to Weber-Stöber, the exhibition uses such works to show developments that have shaped today’s jewelry scene in Austria and influenced subsequent generations of jewelry artists.
Points to the wearer’s chest like an arrow: necklaces by the artist Brigitte Lang from her series of works “Defense Reaction. heart”, 1982.
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Image: Sandra sentinel
The goldsmith house is also offering the special exhibition “Fascination with Gold – Female Goldsmiths of the 20th Century” until May 31st. The presentation combines jewelery by the goldsmiths Elisabeth Treskow, Ruth Koblassa, Renate Schaub, Brigitte Burkhardt, Ebbe Weiss-Weingart and Gisela Flügge from the house collection. The works of the six artists show the range of traditional techniques and processing methods for gold. The women were masters of their profession, possessed a high level of craftsmanship and innovatively developed the art of goldsmithing, as Weber-Stöber says. All maintained close ties to the Gesellschaft für Goldschmiedekunst, either as longstanding members or, as in the case of Elisabeth Treskow and Ebbe Weiss-Weingart, as recipients of the Society’s Golden Ring of Honor.
160 hours of work on the masterpiece
The subject of the exhibition is also the importance of the granulation technique for the goldsmith’s art of the 20th century. According to Weber-Stöber, Treskow was involved in the rediscovery of this ancient technique and, as a professor, trained talented young people. One of her students was Ruth Koblassa, who first took over her father’s goldsmith’s workshop before becoming self-employed and a designer. Renate Schaub decorated smaller parts of her playful jewelry with granulation. The youngest of the six, Gisela Flügge, used, among other things, triangular granulation to decorate her masterpiece, a belt buckle on which, according to the museum director, she worked 160 hours.
A close relationship existed between the master goldsmiths Ebbe Weiss-Weingart and Brigitte Burkhardt. The two met in Munich in the early 1950s. According to Weber-Stöber, the exchange can be recognized in the similarity of some early pieces. While Weiss-Weingart soon experimented with the chemical treatment of the gold surface and created three-dimensional structures, Burkhardt concentrated on the processing of colored stones, which she made shine with a cabochon cut.
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