Kostbarkeiten-Kakegae no nai mono

Artist list

Susan Pietzsch

Susan Pietzsch is a German contemporary jewellery artist using sweets, such as chocolates or sugar, as a motif and its material. Her basic concept is to find beauty and value of the things that are consumed in our daily life. The gallery space is an old warehouse built in the end of Edo period. Susan Pietzsch will exhibit her works as “precious things” in this traditional space that had been protecting ones property. This is her first solo exhibition in Japan.


Susan Pietzsch's intervention on the theme of sugar conveys a complex reflection on the subject of sugar objects, their meaning and sometimes bizarre incarnations in various cultures. Sugar is one of the first industrially produced foodstuffs and, at least since the 19th century, a pleasure drug for the masses. Though it is true that pure sugar today is increasingly less consumed in private households, industrially produced, sugar containing foods, like soft-drinks, cakes, ice cream, jam and an almost inexhaustible variety of ever new sweets, make it through surreptitiously and, in a similar way, sugar substitutes are still, as always, an important consumer article. Besides, sugar objects still have their traditional religious usages, be it at the All Souls' festivities in Mexico with its death skulls made out of sugar icing; the cult of the dead in Japan, with its grave offerings made from sugar; or in the realm of European traditions, at the Three Kings' festival.
Instead of imitating the often-loud colors of the originals, the works of the artist appear in the pure white monochrome of the material they are made from: refined sugar or sugar substitute. Striped bare of the colors, it develops a remarkably alienating effect, which casts a different light on the form, emphasizing it and sometimes granting it an unexpected aesthetic. Moreover, this strategy to reduce the colorful variety of the sugar items to their main ingredient, distinctly emphasizes the strange modes of diversification the sugar industry deploys to market their monotonous, dull comfort foods, by use of varying colors, shapes, packaging and "extras" with predominantly dubious benefits.
Susan Pietzsch's work distinguishes itself by being simultaneously conventional, wearable jewellery , and also something that functions as an autonomous object or installation, which then, presented independent of the body, is not conveyed as adornment but as an artistic statement.
In her artistic work, another aspect brings in an additional alienating effect: the dimension. Installations with huge Smarties made from Isomalt (a sugar substitute) that seem like oversized bars of soap; or montages of countless white, plastic-trash give-aways from ice-cream packages, cast from a sugar substitute, which translate the sweet raw material into an aesthetic, which goes from the seductively magical to the astonishingly irritating. While the monstrous Smarties appear truly inedible, hard to digest, the sphere made from partly melted plastic-trash-figures displays the magic of molded frozen (sugar-) water and refers to the luxurious ice sculptures of festive banquets. All this doesn't happen in a didactic-ponderous way but inspirations are imparted in a refreshing, wide-awake, and somewhat laconic manner, and are designed to open up unusual visual perspectives on sweets.
A catalog will appear parallel to the exhibition. It consists of a preface that introduces the theme of the exhibition as well as containing additional publications about contemporary jewellery in Germany. For this catalog, the artists Susan Pietzsch and Valentina Seidel will collaborate on photographic work in Tokyo. The catalog will be part of the previously published series of catalogs of (Schmuck)2 e.V..