Jewellery by Michael Becker

Artist list

Michael Becker

At this exhibition Michael Becker present works of the last three years.

About his work:

A play of light contained

Proportion and lattice-work, one cell growing from another - a calculated rhythm of unity and spatial depth - barely perceptible motion in the reflection of the light: Michael Becker's jewellery unfolds from the unreality of its outline into an ideal.
It was in the architecture of Palladio - but also in that of Mies van der Rohe - that Michael Becker sought its inspiration and saw himself confirmed. And that not by chance - for both are concerned, albeit under very different precepts, with an intellectual taming of beauty and thus that stirving for an aesthetic absolute which Becker shares.

This decrees that the idea and the essence of this beauty manifest themselves in perfect proportion. It is to capture this and to give it a setting that is the task of the gold- and silversmith. Palladio saw his teacher and mentor in Nature, and was not prepared to tolerate anything "that is alien to her". Circle, square and polygon were seen as symbolizing the universe, the planets, the divine will. To follow in the footsteps of Palladio demands belief in the intrinsic coherence of things, of the particular with the whole, of harmony and of order, and on the threshold of the 21st century appears foolhardy and romantic.

The search for a universal order and the nature of its constituents has inspired artists of all descriptions across the epochs. Seen thus, Michael Becker is a classicist. His designs intensify in symbolic fashion one of the humanity`s oldest dreams of absolute beauty, purity of form and structural perfection, broken in the shimmer of the light trapped in the surface and reflected by it. Becker`s pieces are born of a feeling for space and give the impression of autonomous bodies whose elements stand in balanced proportion, one to the other. No one part can be discarded, for it is only their unity, their fusion that guarantees the specific character of their perfection. Starting from the smallest possible form, encircling it and developing ist structures from it, Michael Becker creates metaphors of order and in this process follows his teacher, Peter Skubic, who defines the making of jewellery as "a work of intellect".
But the play of the light and its suggestion of an imaginary motion of the fragile, precious substance burst the confines of this idea and allows us to detect, behind the measure and the number, a quality which we may perhaps call "yearning".

Dr. Ellen Maurer, Die Neue Sammlung, München