In The Beginning There Was Red by Carina Shoshtary

Artist list

Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary

One of contemporary jewelry’s rising stars, Carina Shoshtary’s jewelry can be characterized as emotional, imaginative and innovative. Shoshtary describes herself as a kind of modern hunter-gatherer as she finds the materials for her artworks in her immediate surroundings. Her choice of materials is often unusual—colorful graffiti from heavily sprayed walls,driftwood from a river, and almond shells from the breakfast table. All her materials have had a previous life, a former use and meaning. With scientific curiosity and sensitive intuition, Shoshtary reveals the potential of these materials.

This curiosity extends to her ongoing interest in color and its psychological and emotional effects. This is exemplified in her most recent body of work, In The Beginning There Was Red. In this series she uses our instinctual understanding of color as a device to communicate an archetypal fable of strength, power and primal desire. In a recent Vogue Italia, Paola Aurucci responds to Shoshtary’s propensity for narrative They are alien jewels in a world that is somewhere between the real and the imaginary, able to make us reflect on the strange journey objects take, inanimate objects with a lot of sentimental value, able to tell us a story, bring up emotions and especially able to unlock memories.

This is Carina’s second solo exhibition at Sienna Patti.


Carina Shoshtary was born in 1979 in Augsburg, Germany, and is of German and Iranian descent. She trained as a goldsmith in Neugablonz, Germany, from 2001 to 2004 and studied jewelry under Professor Otto Künzli at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, from 2006 to 2012. Shoshtary has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including the Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt, Germany, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, Cheongju International Craft Biennale 2013, Cheongju, Republic of Korea and the Ruthin Craft Centre, Ruthin, England. Her work is in the public collections of the Röhsska Museum, Gothenburg, Sweden, and the International Design Museum, Munich, Germany. In 2012 she was awarded the Bavarian State Prize for Emerging Designers and the Upper Bavarian Prize for Applied Arts. She was a finalist for the sponsorship award of the city of Munich in 2013 and the Art Jewelry Forum Artist Award in 2016. Shoshtary has also lectured internationally about her work and her online project, Karma Chroma.