The Portrait in Jewellery: Representing the Other, Tracing the Self. Spotlight Artworks by Klimt02
Published: 18.05.2025
- Author:
- Cécile Maes, Klimt02
- Edited by:
- Klimt02
- Edited at:
- Barcelona
- Edited on:
- 2025
By definition, a portrait freezes a being into an image, most often a face. A face that exists, or once did.
In every portrait, there’s a quest for resemblance. A desire to capture something human and make it visible. Almost eternal. Or maybe, to make that presence eternal.
This Spotlight emerged from a journey into the history of painted portraiture, offering a way of looking that brings familiar artworks into dialogue with a Klimt02 selection of contemporary jewellery. Not to compare, but to explore how these pieces, through their connection to the body, physical and cultural, are as powerful as painting to question who we are, where we come from, and how we are remembered.
Version française - French version 
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Like Jack Dawson sketching his dear Rose, in a desperate attempt to hold onto what is bound to disappear (he had the flair, that Jack). This gesture echoes the founding myth of portraiture, told by Pliny the Elder. The legend goes that, in Corinth, a young woman, fearing her lover's departure, asked her father to trace his profile from the shadow cast upon the wall.
First portrait. First act of love against absence. Something both intimate and tragic.
We humans, we’re face experts. Is that why portraits have such a profound effect on us? They speak of us. And really, what could be more fascinating than talking about ourselves?
A bit self-centred, are we? Probably, yes.
That might be why the most famous work in Western art history is… a portrait. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa turned into a full-blown icon. A secular Madonna, radiating that maternal tenderness Leonardo held so dear (not DiCaprio this time).
It holds the aesthetic, social, and moral codes of an era. It becomes a document. A visual archive of society, or at least of a certain group within it.
But what makes it fascinating is that every gaze placed upon it belongs to the present. Each person, each era, brings their own references and their context. A portrait is a constant back-and-forth between past and present, distance and intimacy, presence and absence. Between what was, and what we are. It reveals this deeply human need, whether from the one represented or the one doing the representing, to be seen, to be recognised… or, not to be forgotten.
Indeed, delving into the history of portraiture is a fascinating journey. It unfolds alongside the story of humanity, almost like an anthropological study in itself. But here, let me offer a tighter focus. A spotlight drawn from explorations into the history of painted portraiture, put in dialogue with a selection of contemporary jewellery.
Jewels that echo the artworks they encounter, carried by the deep conviction that jewellery, through its intimate connection to the body, both physical and cultural, is just as powerful a medium as the great works of art to question our existence, our identities, our memories.
Voiceless yet powerful, portraits often reveal a lot (or perhaps too little) about how a time perceived the individual.
As early as Antiquity, the Fayum portraits from the first century AD were placed inside funeral wrappings and accompanied the deceased in burial rituals. These painted faces, frontal, sometimes anonymous, sometimes named, were never meant to be seen. They stare at the world they are leaving and are open towards the beyond.
During the Renaissance, the individual is placed at the centre. Art seeks to capture the uniqueness of the subject's soul. The portrait becomes a mirror of personal identity… but also of social status, visible and exposed. In the 17th century, the court portrait (portrait d’apparat) invaded royal courts. It’s no longer about portraying a person, but about displaying power: opulent clothes, codified poses, luxurious settings. Everything is carefully staged to freeze a rank in time. First reserved for monarchs and clergy, the bourgeoisie took it over in the 19th century. One commissions one’s image the way one builds a legacy.
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Portrait of a female mummy, Fayum region, 3rd century. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Legacy, legacy… depending on who’s holding the brush.
In Time and the Old Women, Francisco de Goya presents two elderly women. One of them holds a miniature portrait of herself, a symbol of vanity and the passing of time. But there’s a detail that changes everything: the diamond arrow in her hair is the same as the one worn by Queen Maria Luisa of Parma in an official royal portrait, painted by Goya himself around that time.
It’s no longer just the ageing body that’s being targeted, but the monarchy itself, frozen in its illusion of eternity.
.jpg)
Equally sharp, Geraldine Fenn, in her series Colonial Comeuppance, reworks collected miniatures from a Eurocentric tradition to subvert the codes of the bourgeois (and colonial) portrait. Extra Pur shows the face of a woman covered with colourful dots. The face disappears beneath the ornament, smothered or deliberately erased by the artist. A way of condemning these figures tied to the history of colonial domination.
This is no small gesture. It opens a conversation and reverses the gaze. Colonial figures, once glorified, now become objects to be looked at, the way looted African artefacts once were. Fenn creates Miniature arenas where Western and African narratives meet. She flips the roles: the colonial figures no longer observe. They are being observed. No longer heroines of a glorified past, but silent witnesses, or even accused figures, of historical violence.
Geraldine Fenn. Brooch: Colonial Comeuppance « Extra-Pur », 2024. Silver, found object (vintage painted miniature), glass, printed tin, steel pin.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
Silent, graceful, ever-composed. For centuries, portraits of women have carried more than just their features. Through them, we glimpse the place society expected them to hold. Elegantly depicted, yes, but often frozen in stereotyped roles: maternity, idleness, sewing…
That’s what Jana Machatová brings into play in In the Cage, a brooch that questions womanhood through a narrative woven between past and present, between intimate memory and critical gaze. In her series Frauenfleiss, the artist reuses fragments from an old German women’s handcraft magazine she found in the attic of her house. From these yellowed pages emerges the portrait of an unknown woman, perhaps moved by dreams of emancipation in early 20th-century Europe. The brooch becomes a fragment of memory, a metaphor for confinement and the freedom longed for, constantly renegotiated.
Jana Machatová. Brooch: In the Cage, 2022. Silver, paper, resin, zircons.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
And thread by thread, I can’t help but think of the silent mother in Young Mother Sewing by Mary Cassatt. She sews, absorbed in the motion, in a soft, suspended scene. A kind of simplicity that, today, reveals the weight of an assigned role, with the home as her only horizon.
.jpg)
Mary Cassatt. Painting: Young Mother Sewing, 1900. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
In a different context, Lalla Essaydi overlays female bodies with calligraphy, reclaiming a language once forbidden. She reclaims and reworks the codes of Orientalist painting to give shape, and voice, to those who have long been reduced to silence or exoticism. In her hands, women are no longer objects to behold but subjects to be heard.
.jpg)
Lalla Essaydi. Photography: Harem women writing, 2008. Harn Museum, Gainesville, USA.
And then, there are portraits where the face refuses to meet our gaze. We sense a presence more than we actually see it. The body, caught in the ordinariness of a moment, doesn’t pose, doesn’t perform. It just is. Real intimacy, yet never addressed directly.
An intimacy that Melanie Bilenker captures in her work. She draws these suspended gestures and quiet private moments using her own hair. The silhouettes, faceless and without defined identity, are nonetheless full of life. Hair becomes the line, the relic of closeness. By reimagining the Victorian mourning jewel, she isn’t trying to preserve melancholic gravity, but to depict what is felt rather than what is seen. A discreet presence, precious, restrained sensuality emerging from the organic material and these sketched bodies. Nudes without nudity, exposed but never offered.
It brings to mind Le Tub by Edgar Degas. A woman’s back, faceless, immersed in what she’s doing, not waiting for the viewer. A scene where the tension rises from our almost impolite desire to grasp a presence that keeps slipping away.
Melanie Bilenker. Brooch: Spine, 2013. Hair, paper, gold, brass, walnut, mineral crystal.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
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Edgar Degas: Painting: Le Tub, 1886. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.
Collectively, portraits create a whole world within a work of art.
Since 2011, Tore Svensson has been creating a series of brooches depicting close friends, colleagues, familiar faces from the contemporary jewellery scene. Each one is shown in profile, framed within an oval, like a descendant of the 18th-century medallions. Stripped down to the essentials, these silhouettes, like shadows cast, carry only the person’s initials, no other details. This deliberate omission of names, unlike his earlier series, invites the viewer to guess, recognise, and remember.
This gallery of portraits becomes a fragment of living memory, both collective and intimate. Among these profiles, the artist portrays himself head-on, among the others, without hierarchy or exclusion. It is not a family tree in the usual sense, but an emotional network, a constellation of intertwined paths and shared glances. Engraved in blackened steel or hand-painted on wood veneer, these presences embody a tribute. A quiet homage to those who mattered.
Tore Svensson. Brooch: BE, 2023. Mr. T Revisited, 2015 and MM, 2020. Photos by Franz Karl.
Tore Svensson. Brooch: Mr. T Revisited, 2015. Veneer wood, acrylic paint, silver. 4 pieces available.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
To conclude this selection, we turn to the hollow steel figures of Niklas Link, often inspired by his self-portraits, which explore self-representation as an act of transformation.
His stylised self-portrait mask is not a trick but a language, a tool to reveal identity. As he says: The ambiguity of a character, which is written in my face, makes the diversity arise. From the freedom of a mask and the personal touch of a caricature to the generality of a symbol: This is how I would describe the main aspects of my jewellery.
Niklas Link highlights certain specific traits, giving his pieces a presence both unique and universal. It recalls James Ensor’s Self-portrait with Masks (1899), where the artist paints himself surrounded (or sometimes merging) with a crowd of masked faces, becoming almost a distorted mirror, at once a social critique and an intimate reflection.
For both Ensor and Link, the mask reveals as much as it conceals, embodying the tension between personal identity and external gaze. Thus, the jewellery surpasses its ornamental function to become a space of questioning the multiplicity of identities.
Niklas Link. Brooch: Ikon, 2022.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
James Ensor: Self Portrait With Masks, 1899. Menard Art Museum, Komaki, Japan.
>> Discover other Portrait pieces at Klimt02
First portrait. First act of love against absence. Something both intimate and tragic.
We humans, we’re face experts. Is that why portraits have such a profound effect on us? They speak of us. And really, what could be more fascinating than talking about ourselves?
A bit self-centred, are we? Probably, yes.
That might be why the most famous work in Western art history is… a portrait. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa turned into a full-blown icon. A secular Madonna, radiating that maternal tenderness Leonardo held so dear (not DiCaprio this time).
It holds the aesthetic, social, and moral codes of an era. It becomes a document. A visual archive of society, or at least of a certain group within it.
But what makes it fascinating is that every gaze placed upon it belongs to the present. Each person, each era, brings their own references and their context. A portrait is a constant back-and-forth between past and present, distance and intimacy, presence and absence. Between what was, and what we are. It reveals this deeply human need, whether from the one represented or the one doing the representing, to be seen, to be recognised… or, not to be forgotten.
Indeed, delving into the history of portraiture is a fascinating journey. It unfolds alongside the story of humanity, almost like an anthropological study in itself. But here, let me offer a tighter focus. A spotlight drawn from explorations into the history of painted portraiture, put in dialogue with a selection of contemporary jewellery.
Jewels that echo the artworks they encounter, carried by the deep conviction that jewellery, through its intimate connection to the body, both physical and cultural, is just as powerful a medium as the great works of art to question our existence, our identities, our memories.
Voiceless yet powerful, portraits often reveal a lot (or perhaps too little) about how a time perceived the individual.
As early as Antiquity, the Fayum portraits from the first century AD were placed inside funeral wrappings and accompanied the deceased in burial rituals. These painted faces, frontal, sometimes anonymous, sometimes named, were never meant to be seen. They stare at the world they are leaving and are open towards the beyond.
During the Renaissance, the individual is placed at the centre. Art seeks to capture the uniqueness of the subject's soul. The portrait becomes a mirror of personal identity… but also of social status, visible and exposed. In the 17th century, the court portrait (portrait d’apparat) invaded royal courts. It’s no longer about portraying a person, but about displaying power: opulent clothes, codified poses, luxurious settings. Everything is carefully staged to freeze a rank in time. First reserved for monarchs and clergy, the bourgeoisie took it over in the 19th century. One commissions one’s image the way one builds a legacy.
Portrait of a female mummy, Fayum region, 3rd century. Musée du Louvre, Paris.Legacy, legacy… depending on who’s holding the brush.
In Time and the Old Women, Francisco de Goya presents two elderly women. One of them holds a miniature portrait of herself, a symbol of vanity and the passing of time. But there’s a detail that changes everything: the diamond arrow in her hair is the same as the one worn by Queen Maria Luisa of Parma in an official royal portrait, painted by Goya himself around that time.
It’s no longer just the ageing body that’s being targeted, but the monarchy itself, frozen in its illusion of eternity.
Francisco de Goya: Time and the Old Women (1810-12). Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, France and Portrait of Queen of Spain Mary Louise of Bourbon Parma (1800-1810). Museo Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain.
Equally sharp, Geraldine Fenn, in her series Colonial Comeuppance, reworks collected miniatures from a Eurocentric tradition to subvert the codes of the bourgeois (and colonial) portrait. Extra Pur shows the face of a woman covered with colourful dots. The face disappears beneath the ornament, smothered or deliberately erased by the artist. A way of condemning these figures tied to the history of colonial domination.
This is no small gesture. It opens a conversation and reverses the gaze. Colonial figures, once glorified, now become objects to be looked at, the way looted African artefacts once were. Fenn creates Miniature arenas where Western and African narratives meet. She flips the roles: the colonial figures no longer observe. They are being observed. No longer heroines of a glorified past, but silent witnesses, or even accused figures, of historical violence.
Geraldine Fenn. Brooch: Colonial Comeuppance « Extra-Pur », 2024. Silver, found object (vintage painted miniature), glass, printed tin, steel pin.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
Silent, graceful, ever-composed. For centuries, portraits of women have carried more than just their features. Through them, we glimpse the place society expected them to hold. Elegantly depicted, yes, but often frozen in stereotyped roles: maternity, idleness, sewing…
That’s what Jana Machatová brings into play in In the Cage, a brooch that questions womanhood through a narrative woven between past and present, between intimate memory and critical gaze. In her series Frauenfleiss, the artist reuses fragments from an old German women’s handcraft magazine she found in the attic of her house. From these yellowed pages emerges the portrait of an unknown woman, perhaps moved by dreams of emancipation in early 20th-century Europe. The brooch becomes a fragment of memory, a metaphor for confinement and the freedom longed for, constantly renegotiated.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
And thread by thread, I can’t help but think of the silent mother in Young Mother Sewing by Mary Cassatt. She sews, absorbed in the motion, in a soft, suspended scene. A kind of simplicity that, today, reveals the weight of an assigned role, with the home as her only horizon.
Mary Cassatt. Painting: Young Mother Sewing, 1900. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.In a different context, Lalla Essaydi overlays female bodies with calligraphy, reclaiming a language once forbidden. She reclaims and reworks the codes of Orientalist painting to give shape, and voice, to those who have long been reduced to silence or exoticism. In her hands, women are no longer objects to behold but subjects to be heard.
Lalla Essaydi. Photography: Harem women writing, 2008. Harn Museum, Gainesville, USA.
And then, there are portraits where the face refuses to meet our gaze. We sense a presence more than we actually see it. The body, caught in the ordinariness of a moment, doesn’t pose, doesn’t perform. It just is. Real intimacy, yet never addressed directly.
An intimacy that Melanie Bilenker captures in her work. She draws these suspended gestures and quiet private moments using her own hair. The silhouettes, faceless and without defined identity, are nonetheless full of life. Hair becomes the line, the relic of closeness. By reimagining the Victorian mourning jewel, she isn’t trying to preserve melancholic gravity, but to depict what is felt rather than what is seen. A discreet presence, precious, restrained sensuality emerging from the organic material and these sketched bodies. Nudes without nudity, exposed but never offered.
It brings to mind Le Tub by Edgar Degas. A woman’s back, faceless, immersed in what she’s doing, not waiting for the viewer. A scene where the tension rises from our almost impolite desire to grasp a presence that keeps slipping away.
Melanie Bilenker. Brooch: Spine, 2013. Hair, paper, gold, brass, walnut, mineral crystal.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
Edgar Degas: Painting: Le Tub, 1886. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.
Collectively, portraits create a whole world within a work of art.
Since 2011, Tore Svensson has been creating a series of brooches depicting close friends, colleagues, familiar faces from the contemporary jewellery scene. Each one is shown in profile, framed within an oval, like a descendant of the 18th-century medallions. Stripped down to the essentials, these silhouettes, like shadows cast, carry only the person’s initials, no other details. This deliberate omission of names, unlike his earlier series, invites the viewer to guess, recognise, and remember.
This gallery of portraits becomes a fragment of living memory, both collective and intimate. Among these profiles, the artist portrays himself head-on, among the others, without hierarchy or exclusion. It is not a family tree in the usual sense, but an emotional network, a constellation of intertwined paths and shared glances. Engraved in blackened steel or hand-painted on wood veneer, these presences embody a tribute. A quiet homage to those who mattered.
Tore Svensson. Brooch: BE, 2023. Mr. T Revisited, 2015 and MM, 2020. Photos by Franz Karl. Tore Svensson. Brooch: Mr. T Revisited, 2015. Veneer wood, acrylic paint, silver. 4 pieces available.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
To conclude this selection, we turn to the hollow steel figures of Niklas Link, often inspired by his self-portraits, which explore self-representation as an act of transformation.
His stylised self-portrait mask is not a trick but a language, a tool to reveal identity. As he says: The ambiguity of a character, which is written in my face, makes the diversity arise. From the freedom of a mask and the personal touch of a caricature to the generality of a symbol: This is how I would describe the main aspects of my jewellery.
Niklas Link highlights certain specific traits, giving his pieces a presence both unique and universal. It recalls James Ensor’s Self-portrait with Masks (1899), where the artist paints himself surrounded (or sometimes merging) with a crowd of masked faces, becoming almost a distorted mirror, at once a social critique and an intimate reflection.
For both Ensor and Link, the mask reveals as much as it conceals, embodying the tension between personal identity and external gaze. Thus, the jewellery surpasses its ornamental function to become a space of questioning the multiplicity of identities.
Niklas Link. Brooch: Ikon, 2022.
>> More about this artwork ON SALE and the author
James Ensor: Self Portrait With Masks, 1899. Menard Art Museum, Komaki, Japan.>> Discover other Portrait pieces at Klimt02
About the author
Cécile Maes graduated from ENSA Limoges in design, specialising in Contemporary Jewellery. Her interest in jewellery grows from the human relationships games it involves. Social object, jewellery creates narratives and becomes a sign. Investigating classical typologies, her work is a re-interpretation where historical references and everyday exploration connect ideas to speak about jewellery, the reasons why we wear it and the meanings we give to it.
Mail: cilce.maes@gmail.com
Instagram: cilce_maes
- Author:
- Cécile Maes, Klimt02
- Edited by:
- Klimt02
- Edited at:
- Barcelona
- Edited on:
- 2025
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