End of Year Exhibition

This show is the culmination of a year during which several of our artists had exceptional shows: Kye-Yeon Son, poetically evoking our snow-covered landscapes with her delicately fashioned jewellery and sculpture in enamelled steel wire in Natures Breath exhibition; Katja Prins’ extraordinary retrospective exhibition, Uncanny Incarnations, in its first North American showing; and Luzia Vogt’s Zucker, exploring our ambivalent relationship to sugar, a substance that is comforting yet detrimental to our health.

In June, Ramon Puig Cuyàs, one of the gallery’s artists, was invited to curate Silence Please, an exhibition in which he shared his thinking on current artistic production, bringing together works by artists from diverse backgrounds. Last fall, an exhibition titled Le Labo included work by artists who took part in Noel Guyomarc’h’s workshops on creativity. In addition, a catalogue was produced for this exhibition. Over the year, Guyomarc’h has been invited, as a guest speaker and critic, by the Nova Scotia College of Art, the Craft Alliance, in Halifax, and the Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec. He was a juror for the Art Aurea Awards, presented by the prestigious German design magazine. In addition, a number of the gallery’s artists were invited by Jean-Claude Poitras to participate in Mode et Design Montréal. In March, Noel Guyomarc’h attended Schmuck 2015, in Munich, for which several artists of the gallery—Ramon Puig Cuyàs, Annamaria Zanella, Jessica Turrell, Mirjam Hiller, Kaori Juzu, Mikiko Minewaki, Tore Svensson and, for the first time, a Quebec artist, Anne-Marie Rébillard-–were selected to participate. During this trip, he discovered or rediscovered the work of several artists, in particular Attai Chen, Carina Chitsaz-Shoshtary and Kazumi Nagano, who he invited to take part in this end-of-year exhibition. Also this year, for the very first time, the gallery participated in the art and design fair known as SOFA Chicago. It was a busy year, to say the least! Conceptual, experimental, with a focus on design and inspired by nature and history, jewellery is the result of an artistic vision, exploration and reflection on the world and on the immediate environment. The artists taking part in this exhibition rival each other when it comes to originality of expression. Seulgi Kwon, Heejoo Kim, Lawrence Woodford and Anne-Marie Rébillard revisit their interpretations of nature, transposing them into works that, due to the range and choice of materials and their composition, take us by surprise. In creating her amusing figurative brooches, Aurélie Guillaume finds inspiration in comic strips and street art. The works of Paul McClure and Elizabeth Boyd Hartmann, inspired by biology, genetics and pathology, move us with their sensitivity and energy. Kazumi Nagano makes use of ancestral Japanese weaving techniques to create brooches of incredible delicacy and elegance. The range of this selection provides an accurate portrait of current production in contemporary jewellery. All the participating artists have created new works for this end-of-year exhibition, which will be on view as of December 6, 2015, at 1 p.m.