Dorothea Prühl

Bio

Dorothea Prühl was born in Breslau on 22 February 1937. After the upheavals of war, which she experienced as a refugee, she spent her later childhood and adolescence in a small Brandenburg village. At nineteen, she began to study art at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle. A one-year practical internship enabled her to acquire the necessary crafts skills. In 1962 she completed her studies by taking a diploma. Her professional career began with a stint as a designer at a state-owned concern. Taking up an offer of a teaching post at Burg Giebichenstein, she returned to Halle in 1966. Together with Renate Heintze, she worked towards a new training concept, that – defying prescribed orientations towards design and without preconceptions about what constituted artworks – focused on the one-off work. In 1974, the jewellery class at the school was consolidated as an independent course of study. Dorothea Prühl was director of the class from 1994 as a professor appointed by the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle until she retired in 2002. She lives and works in Halle an der Saale and Augustenberg in Mecklenburg.

Statement

Jewellery is, for me, something fundamentally positive. It suggests strength, wealth, splendour, beauty. This may sound banal, but it is not banal if you want to understand it properly. I am satisfying an archaic yearning that I share with the viewer or the wearer, and that connects me to them. To this end, I am looking for images and signs.
Day-to-day politics are of no interest to me. They are always only a part of what really happens. I need distance and a different perspective. Whether my work is contemporary was never a question for me. I live in my time and it has shaped me. Thus, my jewellery will look different from something that was made a hundred years ago.
When something touches me deeply – a piece of music, a text, a thing – I am happy and thankful for a message in which I recognise myself. This also means anything is possible. In the end, it is not what is said but how it is said that matters. That is probably the secret of form.