Colourful jewels

Artist list

Barbara Uderzo

For her production of contemporary jewels, Barbara Uderzo reworks concepts, forms, materials and techniques in a climax of spectacular thematic series.
Blob Rings explore the iconographic side of popular culture. Realized in coloured plastics, they incorporate pop micro-objects, such as very small coffeepots or motorcycles, with an omnivorous capacity worthy of the famous magma from which they take their name.
CandyCandle Rings, candle-rings of surreal and coloured geological forms, once lit turn themselves into bonsai-craters, with wax flows on the hand-city of the owner.
Mineralia consists of a series of rings and necklaces realized in 2004 using stones picked up in a trip along the Mediterranean coasts. The process of workmanship is totally replaced by the activity of the artist, who selects and picks up her work in the "deposits" of nature and does nothing more than contextualizing it differently, proposing landscapes in the form of jewels.

From a text by Martino Marconato.


Barbara Uderzo defines her production "contemporary jewel", where the adjective acts as a bridge between the object and its signifier, residing in contemporary art. The contemporary jewel incorporates an artistic sign in the economy of an object of use. The "contemporary" sign in the work of BU is the conceptual element that regulates the planning, by thematic series, and the perception of the product, an open work that enriches itself in the relationship with the spectator and requires the intellectual participation of the beneficiary/buyer.
Frequently reviewed in the specialized press and in magazines of contemporary art, the jobs of BU are often defined through the pop category, and the emphasis is put on the lucid irony and the contemporary culture quotations that appear in the product/jewel. The artistic operation of Barbara Uderzo is instead of a conceptual matrix, a job of linguistic reconstruction of art categories into the categories of design, where the "cult value" of the work of art is popularized in the "aesthetical-functional value" of the ring as an object of personal use. In the process of democratization, the object ring and its personal biographical references take the place of the "high way" of the artistic tradition.