Kukas: Amanhã (Tomorrow)

Kukas, 1960s. Brooch. Silver. 3.6 x 6.7 x 1.5 cm.
Collection: Maria da Graça Barbosa de Carvalho. Photo: José Manuel Costa Alves.


Upon returning to Lisbon, she presented her first solo exhibition at Galeria Diário de Notícias in 1963. The 68 pieces on display sold out entirely. In an artistic milieu still unfamiliar with jewellery as an autonomous language, her proposals were met with astonishment and significant critical recognition. Lisbon’s avant-garde perceived in her work an affinity with the transformations unfolding in other artistic disciplines. Painting and architecture, in particular, remained structural references within her formal thinking.

In 2010, nearly five decades after her first solo exhibition, I began curating her retrospective at MUDE –Museu do Design in Lisbon, gathering 480 pieces from 76 lenders in just three months — collectors, artists, and friends. This dispersion revealed a fundamental aspect of her practice: Kukas’s work does not exist as a static archive, but as a living constellation of relationships. Each jewel is a receptacle of experiences and affections, conceived in dialogue with its wearer. They are not merely objects for the body; they inhabit daily life and persist in the memory of their owners. As the painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) remarked in 1988, referring to a 1963 ring: My hands are already deformed; the ring no longer fits me. But I keep it in a glass case and look at it every day. [1]


Kukas, Untitled, 1967. Silver, zircon and quartz with graphite. 3.3 x 2.6 x 3.4 cm.
Private collection. Photos: José Manuel Costa Alves.


Her own house functioned as an informal museological device: there, work, collection, and daily life coexisted and were organised as a living archive. Alongside stored materials and projects, she maintained her art collection—particularly paintings—as well as pieces she had designed herself. Her bedroom, in particular, constituted a territory of memory, where processes, references, and affections accumulated like the strata of a creative biography.

During the curatorial process, I invited several lenders to be photographed wearing their jewels. This gesture made visible the intimate and biographical dimension of her work. I recall especially the encounter with the artist Ana Hatherly (1929-2015), who wore an amber and silver bracelet from 1963 — a piece Kukas had exchanged for a text written by Hatherly for an exhibition at Galeria Interior in 1966. The jewel emerged not merely as an art object, but as testimony to an active and affective cultural network. The sphere of amber she is contemplating confirms the continuous and eternal cycle implicit in this object. [2]


Ana Hatherly with her 1963 Untitled Kukas’s bracelet in silver and amber.
Photo: C. B. Aragão, 2011.


Kukas, Untitled, 1960s. Silver and amber. 9 x 7.4 x 2.8 cm.
Private collection. Photo: José Manuel Costa Alves.


Despite early recognition, Kukas remained a singular figure within the Portuguese context. Her trajectory unfolded largely within the art gallery circuit and, during the 1980s and 1990s, within the space she created to present her own designs exclusively. Among her closest interlocutors were the painters José Escada (1934–1980) and Nikias Skapinakis (1931–2023), figures central to the renewal of Portuguese painting in the second half of the twentieth century. Her practice did not crystallise into a school, nor did it fully integrate into the institutional discourses of contemporary jewellery then emerging both nationally and internationally. This condition of singularity — simultaneously central and isolated — contributes today to the complexity of her historical reading. That peripheral position did not diminish the impact of her work; on the contrary, it preserved a rare artistic autonomy.


José Escada, Untitled (Spatial Relief), 1974.
Nickel-plated tinplate relief on a tinplate base. 200 x 100 x 14 cm. 
Photo by Eduardo Sousa Ribeiro. Collection: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Inv. 95P347.

Kukas, Untitled, 1970s. Silver.  Ø 6.5 x 8.3 cm.
Private collection. Photo José Manuel Costa Alves.


Kukas and José Escada, Paris, 1960s.
Photo courtesy of the artist.


In the early decades of her career, production was often marked by tensions with goldsmiths and silversmiths, who did not always grasp the formal radicality of her proposals. With irony, Kukas recounted that they would sometimes say to one another: Do it like Picasso — that’s what this lady wants! The metaphor, intended to justify unconventional solutions, revealed instead the difficulty of interpreting a language that refused convention.

A compulsive creator, she may be associated with Bruno Munari’s principle: things arise from things. [3] Her imagination frequently stemmed from free associations and natural phenomena — a cloud that breaks into rain, as she once described — transforming poetic intuitions into refined geometric structures.


Kukas, Untitled, 1980s. Silver and moonstones. Chain: 42 cm, Pendant: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 cm.
Private collection. Photo José Manuel Costa Alves.


This is the room where Kukas's exhibition took place at the MUDE – Museu do Design in 2011.
It used to be a bank vault. Photo: Mariano Piçarra (the exhibition designer).


At the age of 97, she felt serene about the continuity of her work. Filipa Fortunato, an architect and admirer of her practice, committed to continuing the Kukas brand after her death, having acted as her patron, executive curator and brand manager officially since 2020. The last exhibition, A Tribute to Geometry [4], curated by Fortunato, presented at the MNAC –Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon, in 2023, revisited the emblematic 1968 exhibition at Galeria 111, where jewels appeared suspended in transparent acrylic blocks hanging from the ceiling, simulating a spatial landscape. As visitors moved through the gallery, they interacted with the suspended spheres and experienced the effect of the jewels on their bodies.


Kukas. Jewellery exhibition at Galeria 111 in 1968.
Photo: Carlos Barral.



Kukas. Jewellery exhibition at Galeria 111 in 1968.
Photo: Carlos Barral.


Maria Antónia de Castro Skapinakis with an Untiled Kukas necklace in silver, moonstones and rutilated quartz, Galeria 111, 1968.
Collection: Vera Costa e Silva. Photo: Carlos Barral.


The most recent body of work I saw, at Casa Fortunato’s studio, included a silver jewel that gives form to the word Amanhã [Tomorrow]. Oversized, almost like a manifesto, it calls on us not to forget that the future is always constructed in the present. Visionary and lucid, she transformed jewellery into an expanded language. Perhaps her own definition of method best synthesises her legacy: I detest schedules, I detest a programmed life; let us say that I organise myself within my disorganisation. My work must unfold with a tranquil availability, fitting into a more or less complete form of freedom. [5]

She also observed that her pieces often acted as conversation catalysts: People used to tell me that my pieces helped them feel more at ease in uncomfortable or even hostile environments because they always sparked a conversation. Emphasising the importance of individuality in her work, she once remarked: I wanted my pieces to carry a distinct mark of individuality and to be recognisable. Being able to transfer a trace of our creativity into an object is important as a form of identification in an increasingly globalised world. As journalist Joana Amaral Cardoso noted in her obituary for the newspaper Público, Kukas remained critical of the homogenisation she perceived in contemporary culture. [6]


Kukas with her 2019 Homenagem à Arquitectura [Tribute to Architecture] and 2017 Pôr-do-Sol [Sunrise] rings in silver, and brass watch mechanism.
Photo: Eduardo Sousa Ribeiro, 2019.


Kukas, 2025. Amanhã [Tomorrow]. Brooch. Silver. 1/10. 15 x 3 x 1 cm.
Photo courtesy: Filipa Fortunato.



/ Cristina Filipe, March 2026


Notes:
[1] Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1988) – apud in Kukas interview conducted by Cristina Filipe. Lisbon, 2010. In Trajectories of Contemporary Jewellery in Portugal. Artists and Contexts (1963–2004). Doctoral thesis in Heritage Studies. Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, vol. II, 2018, p. 590. (Author translation).
[2] Kukas in Cristina Filipe (editor). A cloud that breaks into rain. Lisbon: MUDE – Museu do Design, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 2011, p. 21.
[3] Bruno Munari (1907-1998) book Da cosa nasce cosa (One thing leads to another), 1981.
[4] “Finally, the theme I chose of honouring painting and architecture, the arts I have always privileged, on the edge of ‘space and time’. I refer to Picasso, Dali, Morando, Paul Klee, Mondigliani, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aires Mateus, Maluda, Nilias Skapinakis, João Vieira and many others.” in Kukas. A Tribute to Geometry. Lisbon: MNAC – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, 2023, p. 77.
[5] Idem, ibidem, p. 157.
[6] Kukas, quoted in Joana Amaral Cardoso, “Kukas (1928–2026), a pioneira da joalharia artística em Portugal”, Público, 15 February 2026.


References:
- Barbara Coutinho, Cristina Filipe (scientific coordinator) and al. Kukas. A Cloud That Breaks into Rain. Lisbon: MUDE – Museu do Design, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, 2011.
- Cristina Filipe. Trajectories of Contemporary Jewellery in Portugal. Artists and Contexts (1963–2004). Doctoral thesis in Heritage Studies. Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, vol. II, 2018.
- Cristina Filipe. Contemporary Jewellery in Portugal. From the Avant-Grade of the 1960s to the Early 21^st Century. Lisbon: MUDE – Museu do Design and the Author. Stuttgart: arnoldche Art Publishers, 2019.
- Raquel Henriques da Silva, Emília Ferreira and al. Kukas. A Tribute to Geometry. Lisbon: MNAC – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, 2023.
 

About the author

Dr. Cristina Filipe (Lisbon, 1965) lives and works in Lisbon. She has a PhD in Heritage Studies from the Catholic University of Porto — School of Arts (2018) and is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) at the same school. She has a Master’s degree in Arts and Design from the Surrey Institute of Art & Design (2001), having been awarded grants from the Foundation for Science and Technology and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, respectively.

She studied jewellery at Ar.Co — Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (1984-1987), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (1987-1988), and the Royal College of Arts (1992). She taught on the jewellery course at Ar.Co (1989-2015), which she directed between 2004 and 2015, and at ESAD — Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Matosinhos (2001-2007). Since 1998, she has been a guest artist, lecturer and educator at several international schools and has overseen several master’s and doctoral theses. She received the Susan Beech Mid-Career Artist Grant from the Art Jewelry Forum (2017) for the book Contemporary Jewellery in Portugal. From the Avant-Garde of the 1960s to the Early 21st Century (2019), with forewords by Gonçalo de Vasconcelos e Sousa (1st edition) and Laura Castro (2nd edition), and English version distributed by Arnoldsche Art Publishers.

She has exhibited internationally since 1984. Since 2005, she has been an independent programmer and curator of exhibitions, symposia, and colloquia. She founded and was president of the board of PIN — Associação Portuguesa de Joalharia Contemporânea (2004-2023). She was the creator and general curator of the 1st Lisbon Contemporary Jewellery Biennial — Cold Sweat (2021). She is the author of several articles and essays, editorial and scientific coordinator of the book Cold Sweat (2022), and creator and scientific coordinator of INCM’s collection ‘J’.