Metrosideros Robusta – The jewelry of Karl Fritsch

Artist list

Karl Fritsch

The strange-sounding title is the botanical name for a member of the myrtle family native to New Zealand. As a hemi-epiphyte it starts life by expanding to the branches of other trees, grows aerial roots, twists around its host and then gradually ousts it. It is this process of forming layers on what exists that jewelry artist Karl Fritsch has made his own.

Karl Fritsch belongs to an international avant-garde that has abandoned the traditional concept of jewelry to explore new avenues. This does not, however, mean simply doing away with conventional jewelry but reviving it, embedding it and approaching it in different ways. ˝I would like to handle gold the same way as you would plasticine,˝ – is his motto. Karl Fritsch often works with wax. He kneads, presses and bends his jewelry into his desired forms, which then serve as models for working the precious metal versions. Typically, he re-works existing pieces of jewelry, alters them, melts them down so as to create wondrous bulging and knotty, elongated or squashed shapes.
This process of treating, shaping and pressing the material is a decisive aspect of his work. Not only does Karl Fritsch not conceal it he also employs it demonstratively as an important aesthetic statement. It is not for nothing that this exhibition of the work process involves reflecting on the production per se – a method recalls his teacher at the academy in Munich: Hermann Jünger, for whom ˝the making˝ is a central element of his work.

What is real? What is fake? What constitutes jewelry? Karl Fritsch questions existing concepts by combining old and new, precious and non-precious materials, uses adhesive or drills through sections. His creations are expressions of pure sensual lust, lavishly adorned with precious stones, bizarre crystals or layer upon layer of glass, real and fake side by side. Provocation, destruction or symbiosis?
The installation ˝Metrosideros robusta˝ that Karl Fritsch has shown in several variations in ’s-Hertogenbosch/Netherlands, Melbourne/Australia and Tallinn/Estonia amongst other places, is accompanied by a book designed by the artist.

A cooperation between the Neues Museum in Nürnberg with the Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich – in collaboration with the artist.