Barbara Uderzo: Rings etc.

Artist list

Barbara Uderzo

Rings etc.

The “Assessorato alla Cultura” of the Municipality of Vicenza promotes an anthological exhibition of jewels created by the artist and designer Barbara Uderzo, who celebrates her twenty years of activity in the field.

In her creative career Barbara Uderzo has developed and carried out her research and experimentation, creating jewels as unique pieces that were presented in different European art galleries and published in important books on the history of jewels. Interested in every aspect of contemporary life, Barbara Uderzo has investigated different, precious and alternative materials, spacing from handicraft techniques to industrial technologies, extending her search to performances in the last few years.
The materials from which she draws inspiration are metals, plastic, wood, paper or ephemeral materials like chocolate and sugar (bijoux-chocolat & glucogioielli), ice and even snow (the free.zero jewels).
Her work focuses primarily on the conceptual aspect of creation; the idea of the project becomes an object related to the body, in which the jewel is a perceptive or sensorial experience or simply the starting point of different transformations.
The exhibition, organized by Stefania Portinari, will feature Barbara Uderzo’s widelly known Succulent Rings, with live mini-cactuses, the Mineralogica series and the chain necklaces like ondina infinita, catena rocciosa, bigolì and others, the candycandles in perfumed wax (that one can melt in order to obtain their inner silver ring, like pledges of love), the deinos rings, “terrible” rings, as their name suggests, with their primordial organic conformations and important dimensions but extremely light, thanks to their making technique in electroforming, the snark rings, with fluid and magmatic shapes like the strange creature of Lewis Carroll’s book, have fluid and magmatic shapes but boast a yellow gold plating, and the splash rings, made of “splashes of precious material on the body”.

Besides paperjewels (jewels made of paper) and some “food” works, the exhibition novelties will be the more recent evolutions of blob rings and the newly created blob brooches which, from the name of the gelatinous and agglutinant substance that gave its name to a cult movie of the late Fifties, integrate in coloured plastics pink dinosaurs and miniatures of teapots, small diamonds and cartoon heroes, stones and little bells.

This exhibition inaugurates a series of exhibitions held at Casa Cogollo, known as the house of Palladio, exclusively dedicated to design. For this circunstance a catalogue of the new series Display will be published. The title of the catalogue is Quaderni di design with texts by Cristina Del Mare, (ethnographer, who investigated the meanings and anthropologic connotations or ornament), by Ellen Maurer Zilioli, (historian of Arts, former curator of Die Neue Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, in Munich, now President of the cultural association Maurer Zilioli–Contemporary Arts of Brescia) and by Stefania Portinari, (historian of jewels and historian of Arts of the University of Ca’ Foscari in Venice).