Untitled. Thomas Gentille. American Jeweler

Artist list

Thomas Gentille

Born 1936 in Mansfield, Ohio, and a resident of New York since 1960, American Thomas Gentille is a leading artist jeweler not just in the United States but in the world as a whole.
He favors innovative plastics, solid aluminum and a wide variety of woods, not to mention papier-mâché, sawdust, silk threads, old glass spheres hand blown in Bohemia and air - over gold, silver and precious stones. Gentille is one of the first artists to employ such non-precious  materials so consistently - and he did so from 1960 onwards, calling into question the value of precious metals in how jewelry is designed and estimated. He only uses high-quality gold for the rear of the brooch. For Thomas Gentille the emphasis is always irrevocably on the piece itself, its artistic statement and its quality. Every item is a one-off, be it a brooch, necklace or bracelet, and a masterpiece of craftsmanship, unique in its affiliation with sculpture and architecture. For this reason, Gentille refuses to date his works as believes them inconsequential.
His works with an eggshell overlay are famous. Using this mysterious method and even without employing the old Asian lacquer technique he produces a krakelée surface on his works. Gentille explains that it takes years of experimentation and practice with the technique until you finally grasp the “soul of the material”.

The exhibition is being produced in close collaboration with Gentille himself and will be located on the second floor of the Rotunda in Pinakothek der Moderne where only one piece, the earliest in the exhibition, dated 1961, is made of black ebony and ultramarine blue silk, with a completely hidden  backing of gold, that does not show, except to its owner.

Pieces by Thomas Gentille can be found, among others, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, in Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London - and in Neue Sammlung in Munich.

Press Conference: February 26, 2016, 11 a.m.
Opening: February 26, 2016, 7 p.m.


Thanks to Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, Danner-Stiftung in Munich and the Maurice English Poetry Award handed over by Helen W. Drutt English and H. Peter Stern, USA.

Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt will be publishing a 230-page catalog on the life and work of the artist with a preface by Angelika Nollert, an essay by Andrea DiNoto and an interview with Thomas Gentille conducted by Bettina Dittlmann and Petra Hölscher.