Preziosa Young 2021 Competition Exhibition

Its first stop was Italy, this spring, during the Florence Jewellery Week 2022, set in the elegant Galleria Del Palazzo Coveri, overlooking the banks of the Arno River. The jewellery pieces on display belonged to the five winners of the latest edition of a competition announced annually by LAO -Le Arti Orafe- since 2008 and designed to reward up-and-comers in the field of body decoration.

Its goal is to capture and popularize the spirit and new instances of contemporary jewellery, raffling prizes that allow the winners to deepen and promote their research. For the LAO Prize, the school hosts the selected candidate for a 3-month stay in Florence, with free access to the laboratory's tools and materials and the willingness of the school's teachers. During the artistic residency, the winner is asked to give a workshop to LAO's students and to commit him or herself to creating or even starting a new jewellery collection, presented at the school's end-of-year party in a dedicated personal space. Another coveted prize is that of Inhorgenta, born out of a collaboration between the school and the famous Munich fair.

The artist who stands out for the high originality and quality of his or her work wins a free personal exhibition space at the next edition of Inhorgenta. Exceptionally, the Preziosa Young 2021 edition saw Charlotte Vanhoubroeck win both the LAO and the Inhorgenta Awards, confirming the great value of her research.

The quality of the winning projects is decreed by a qualified jury, composed of professionals, like teachers and scholars in the art and jewellery field, goldsmith artists, jewellery designers, gallery owners, fair managers, bloggers, and journalists. The selection procedure is carried out according to a system of preferences and in total transparency, as the jurors do not know the participants' names, their country of origin, or their education. There is no participation fee charged to the candidate, who only has to declare that he or she is under 35 years old.
 
This time the winners, among the many who applied, are Xinia Guan and Zhipeng Wang from China, Anne Lahn Hornbæk Hansen from Denmark, Pilynn Siriphanich from Thailand, and Charlotte Vanhoubroeck from Belgium.

The individual work of each of these protagonists, when analyzed together as a whole, covers many aspects of jewellery, transforming itself -unbeknownst to them- into a choral effort that describes and narrates all the components that characterize the decorative object: the construction process of the piece, the (revised) concept of preciousness, experimentation with techniques and materials, hidden affective values and expressed cultural symbols… writes curator Alice Rendon in the catalogue with high-resolution colour images accompanying the touring exhibition.

The jury who selected the winners was composed of accomplished artists Lauren Kalman and Conversation Piece (Beatrice Brovia & Nicolas Cheng), 2017 art residency winner Qiana Wang, art historian Alice Rendon, jewellery historian Maria Laura La Mantia, founder of Lost in Jewellery Magazine & Mydaybyday Gallery in Rome Laura Helena Aureli, and Galerie Door’s owner, Doreen Timmers.
The latter will host the second stop of the Preziosa Young exhibition in her Dutch gallery between November and December. She said: I am particularly looking forward to opening the Preziosa Young exhibition in Mariaheide and I am proud that from 13 November until 11 December 2022, the extraordinary work of the five international prize winners of the Preziosa Young Award will be on display in the Netherlands for the first time.

The exhibition will reach Barcelona at Hannah Gallery Klimt02, from 11 January to 3 February 2023.

The gallery's name, Door, indeed recalls that of its owner. Still, above all it refers to its mission, which is to open the fabulous doors of the wonderland of art jewellery to the public, quoting a happy metaphor used by Maria Cristina Bergesio, the curator of all Preziosa Young editions from 2008 to 2019.

Among the many international names represented by the Galerie Door -from Dutchman Philip Sajet to German Danni Schwaag, from Korean Coco Sung to Georgian Tatjana Giorgadse- there is the winner of Preziosa Young 2020: Dutchwoman Elwy Schutten, trained in goldsmithing and jewellery design in Schoonhoven, Rotterdam, and Maastricht, and winner of the Talente Prize 2019. Schutten's jewellery collections investigate the potential of jewellery to represent the wearer's identity, giving voice to the ambiguity and complexity of this concept, in perpetual conflict between our need for freedom of expression and the social and cultural dynamics in which we are immersed. This reflection on the meanings of adornment, which touches the world of jewellery as much as that of fashion, is rendered by the artist through the fragmentation and mixture of the materials used.

Experimentation with materials and techniques, as well as consistency between the original creative idea and its translation into an object, are in fact fundamental requirements for winning the competition. Several are the young talents awarded by the contest over the years who have successfully pursued their research path, reconfirming Preziosa Young as a reliable and internationally recognised event.

>>For more information about the contest, visit Preziosa Young 2021 website.