Andrea MAXA Halmschlager
Jeweller
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MunichJewelleryWeek2024
Published: 04.02.2025
News!
19 new pieces and an updated CV have been added to the artist's profile.
gmx.atBio
Andrea MAXA Halmschlager is an artist based in Vienna, Austria, and Regensburg, Germany. She was trained at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. During 1993-2008, she was a teacher for sculptural design and metalwork at Schulzentrum Herbststraße, Vienna. Her work can be seen in exhibitions, publications, as well as in public collections in Austria, such as Stadt Wien, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, MAK, Vienna, and in LACMA, Los AngelesStatement
Color meets color, pattern encounters pattern, Bordabesques discover the body.Red rose vines on a black and white background was the start of my love for the border trimmings. I collect old ones from workshops that have long ceased to exist, new ones from China, valuable ones at exorbitant prices, and cheap ones by the kilo. Border trimmings sewn together produce fabrics and new associations. Titles inspired by the textile images such as Rosenrot, Hippie and Gecko shape their future design.
Draped around your body, the "Bordabesques" invite you to play with your positioning, as the Jeu à l’or shows. I see the fighter in me when I wear it as a belt around my waist. When I arrange it as a headdress, I feel as though I am in a painting by an old master.
In Between and Butterflies
I have always been fascinated by the idea of sewing rough diamonds into clothing so that they can be transported invisibly. The two series of work In Between and Butterflies are inspired by this and go beyond it, as I am not only interested in wrapping and storing stones, but also in visualizing and emphasising something enclosed. I take up the aspect of sewing an object between textiles, replacing protective, opaque clothing with lace, the material par excellence that envelops and at the same time allows visibility. Also, the stones I use are not rough diamonds, but amber, glass and semiprecious stones, true to my motto that the value of a piece of jewellery should lie in the idea and not in the material. When hard material is tightly enclosed by soft material, folds and distortions are created. I fix and emphasise the resulting three-dimensionality with the help of silicone.
Anthozoa and Nests
For some years now, my sister's brightly coloured fabric remnants have been the inspiration and starting material for my jewellery designs. I work according to the methods of deconstruction and reconstruction with textiles as diverse as linen, cotton, silk, hemp, velvet and viscose. I cut these scraps into strips, reduce them by fraying them and combine them with stone beads. This results in necklaces with integrated pendants or simple necklaces, depending on how the stripes are arranged. I then knot the threads that have been removed during fringing into a new textile base, combining threads of different textures and colours. This leads to brooches covered with threads that hang down like ferns on trees or that stand up and can be formed into flowers.
As a contrast to the necklaces and brooches in this series, which take many hours of work to shape, I have been creating large pendants, which I call Nests, since the summer 2024. Their centre consists of leftover threads that I had not knotted into brooches and ear jewellery. I form them into small balls, lay them on cardboard and pour several layers of differently coloured silicone over them. On the occasion of participating a group exhibition, I developed a small series of pendants from an initially created object, the shape of which is strongly determined by the material properties of the threads. While silk threads sink under the weight of the silicone, cotton threads retain the shape in which I had positioned them on the cardboard better. The result is always surprising: how the layers of silicone penetrate the ball of threads and what the section in which the textile material becomes visible looks like varies from time to time and cannot be controlled. These experimental works in particular are a special attraction to me and a welcome balance to the other Anthozoa works.
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News!
19 new pieces and an updated CV have been added to the artist's profile.
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