Back to All Events

THE MADNESS OF ART AND JEWELRY


  • Jim Kempner Fine Art 501 W 23rd Street New York, NY 10011 (map)

OPENING RECEPTION 

November 14, 6pm-8pm

BREAKFAST WITH THE ARTISTS

November 17, 10-12pm

From November 14 - 19, we will collaborate with NYC Jewelry Week to celebrate the long, rich history of artists working across mediums and disciplines.  We will put jewelry in dialogue with paintings, sculptures and works on paper made by renown modern and contemporary artists. 

Like oil, graphite or marble, renown artists have often gravitated to jewelry as another medium to fully realize their creative expression. They showed as much vigor and experimentation in their jewelry design as they did in their monumental works.

Our installation will include the jewelry of artists Stephanie Dubsky, Heidi Abrahamson, Rocio Ines Marsyas, Jay Kelly and Boaz Vaadia in dialogue with art work from celebrated modern and contemporary artists such as Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, Louise Nevelson, Boaz Vaadia, Louise Bourgeois and Robert Rauschenberg, Chris Beane, David Mitchell and Terry Winters.

November 14 - 19, T-Sat 10-6pm, Sun 12-5pm

Heidi Abrahamson

“I don’t think of Heidi as a jeweler. She’s more a sculptor who happens to use jewelry as her medium for getting across her ideas of what form and line are all about.” John Reyes, art curator. Heidi Abrahamson was born to German immigrants and studied fine art, music and interior design at Indiana University. In 2005, after almost 20 years working in visual merchandising and as a stylist, she started making jewelry. Heidi is a lifelong collector of modernist, Scandinavian and antique jewelry which inspired her to try jewelry making herself - she is self taught. She worked her way through Scandinavian inspired designs, then through working with precious and semi precious stones, moving more towards miniature sculptures in sterling and brass. Heidi is inspired by architecture.

Limited Editions by Stephanie Dubsky

A graduate of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with an MA in Product Design, Dubsky moved to New York in 1999 to work in the curatorial department of The Guggenheim Museum. She later held the position as Director of the Design Shop at the Neue Galerie. Driven by her passion for creating objects, she discovered the world of jewelry making, which led her to make one-of-a-kind jewelry crafted of porcelain and precious metals. She designed an exclusive collection of porcelain rings and bowls for the Whitney Museum Shop and participated in the MAD About Jewelry show at the Museum of Arts and Design. The Japan Jewellery Designers Association selected her work On Harmony and exhibited it at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. She participated in the Contemporary Craft Show at The Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the very first NYCJW in 2018.

Jay Kelly

"I’m not going to talk about my work." A cloud of defiance as thick as the smoke of his cigar wafts over him as he dabbles solder onto a tiny metal sculpture.  He never had respect for conventions, rules… not even time. Just like his obsessively labored sculptures Jay Kelly seems to move fluently through centuries. Not agreeing on the now. His pieces tell a story of yearning for a time that never existed. Like props or artifacts from a world just beyond reach - that seem all too familiar but, then again, elude understanding. This small-scale work ranges from burdened to playful. From imposing to delicate. Alone, they stand tall and proud at all but 6 inches. Together the pieces form a unity, a tiny city of sorts. Created on a small folding table in NYC, these pieces feel influenced by their surroundings. With hints of old Americana, city brutality, grace, elegance, cast away curb-side items, industrial landscapes, busted tires and washed up buoys. "I like to refine my shapes over the years. I feel like I’m getting closer to the purest forms and shapes that turn me on," Kelly absentmindedly says about his work. "They have to have a certain weight," he continues, now filing at tiny metal flanges. "See… I’m a tinkerer… that’s what I do". -Suzanne Levesque

RIMA JEWELS

RIMA JEWELS is the cumulative work and ongoing explorations of artist Rocio Ines Marsyas' concurrent metal smithing practice that began nearly two decades ago as an apprentice to a fourth generation jeweler in a Central American port town. The collections, limited edition pieces, and custom works marry an array of interests including the early history of alchemical practice, Roman antiquities, and the richly textured history of vanitas paintings and their memento mori jewelry counterparts. Rocío views her more recent works in solid 24K gold as extended metaphors within the memento mori genre. The delicate pieces foreground techniques and finishes such as repoussé, chasing, hammering and fine milling; all commonly used to fabricate funerary gold objects across cultures in antiquity. It is through this attention to workmanship and the purity of material that Rocío reimagines funerary gold as an attractive and enigmatic ornament for the living —a way forward in comfortable liminality.

Earlier Event: November 2
STILL MOVING: Photography by Danny Clinch
Later Event: February 8
Faces & Figures