This morning we started by travelling out
to Schmuck in Gern Renate Scholz to seen the Welcome to Steinerberg exhibition
by Claudia Steiner and Ingrid Berg. Unfortunately we must have mixed up the
days because it seemed to have been taken down already and the gallery was
certainly closed in any case. We headed back to town as saw the following
shows…
Attachments by Continued collective; Schnitt/Incision at
Tschenchisches Zentrum; Hidden Beauty – Inner Skins at Studio Gutendort; On the
elementary power of jewelery at the Maximillians Forum Passage fur Kunst und
Design. Only four shows today so nice and light. Honestly at this point we were
all pretty jewellery-ed out!
I found the installation of Attachments
interesting. I liked that it was in an otherwise unassuming little shop entry
way in a regular street in a not-particularly-artsy part of town. This
injection of contemporary jewellery into the everyday set up an interesting
dynamic, I wonder how many people going about their morning shopping stopped to
enter the corridor like exhibition space, I hope a few did and that it wasn’t
just Schmuck attendees searching it out. I enjoyed seeing Schnitt/Incision.
Each Czech jeweller was well installed with a simply laid out and well-executed
exhibition. I found each of the bodies of work to be strong and refined, it can
be hugely satisfying to walk into a room of well made things that craftsmanship
with unique concepts that attempt to break new ground. I must admit that when
we were walking to Inner Skins I thought it was a group show… this must have
set me up disappointment and Its entirely my fault as I’m sure I read the
description wrong. I was expecting a group show where each jeweller used animal
skins and innards in different ways. So when I walked into the room full of
work which was decidedly similar, aesthetically and through it’s method of
manufacture… I was somewhat nostalgic for what-might-have-been. Indeed if there
ever IS group show featuring animal innards I certainly think work by textile
designers Eva Schlechte and Jennifer Hier should be included. I appreciated the
inroads they had made into learning age-old natural tanning and dying methods
to produce this body of work.
‘On the elementary power of jewellery’ was
I think the last thing we saw. It blew me away! I’m so pleased we made it.
Perhaps blew me away is not the right expression… it knocked me for six? Came
out of left field? It was strange and otherworldly to walk down into the old
pedestrian tunnel, watch the staged (?) documentary video of a strange man who
left his family to make work in the wilderness and to peer into the darkened
quasi-kitschy diorama display, which itself contained artfully subtle details
(like the pearl necklaces tightly cutting into tall thin tree trunks that I
noticed only on second inspection). It was perhaps this meshing of genres which
made the exhibition so successful to me – success has different markers for all
of us I suppose, but when I stop thinking about whether an exhibition is
‘successful’ and just look on with wonder trying to work out what’s going on,
thirsty for more of it, I believe that’s when a show ticks my box.
‘On the elementary power of jewellery’ was
in such sharp contrast to what we had already seen that day, what we had seen
so far in all of Schmuck so far, that I felt my brain thinking in a new way, a
sideways tangent that I wasn’t expecting. It’s my winner for the day.
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