Retrospective: Evolution by Vered Kaminski

Artist list

Vered Kaminski

Vered Kaminski is an icon in the Israeli art and design field, who takes a leading role in international contemporary art jewelry. This exhibition follows the evolution of her creative process for over thirty years. Vered Kaminski’s oeuvre is remarkable for reproducing – in the realm of jewelry design – the grand patterns of biological evolution in nature. Her works are never isolated from each other. Rather, as in the biological sphere, they are each a variation on a given theme. These incremental variations gradually accumulate into larger and larger schemes, eventually resulting in dramatically diverse works of art. Her celebrated In the Power of Two (2ⁿ) Series might serve to illustrate the evolution of Kaminski’s work. Here, as in nature, the repeated division of a metal wire brings us eventually to the dense canopy of a full-blown tree.

Jewelry is among the earliest manifestations of human creativity. Over the millennia, its artistic significance was sometimes overshadowed by other art forms such as painting and sculpture. This situation began to change in the mid-nineteenth century when, in response to the massive industrial production, handicrafts, including jewelry, were once again highlighted. The movements of Art Nouveau and Art Deco prized jewelry as an important art form. The twentieth century witnessed a persistent questioning of what is art. The boundaries of artistic creation were broadened so as to include jewelry design. Nowadays jewelry is emerging as a major form of the contemporary arts, which no longer distinguish between strict disciplines. The current exhibition demonstrates the tremendous potential of this ancient, yet exceptionally modern, art form: Jewelry.