Bernhard Schobinger: The Rings of Saturn

The Rings of Saturn
The finger ring is a familiar cultural artefact in our society: it can bear the coveted diamond or be a sign of union. Not so with Bernhard Schobinger! From his objects of the last forty-five years, artistic as well as societal developments can be deduced. The ring as contemporary witness: Concrete art, the Punk aesthetic, postmodernism and more. Like all avant-gardists, Schobinger pursues the expansion of his own artistic genre, subverts their traditional norms – wearability, value – and subjects them to a radical reappraisal.

Schobinger was led astray, in particular by the shift of social and aesthetic paradigms in the Punk movement at the beginning of the 1970s, to an almost ‘reckless’ working practice that broke countless taboos. He migrated from the usual ‘valuable’ materials, preferring instead to feature others that showed the emotional content or the conceptual worth he sought. The objects created at that time provoked strong reactions, even hostility. Yet they have proved to be infl uential on style and have deeply shaped subsequent generations of jewellery artists.

The basic concept of the 272-page book is an overview of almost all the rings that Bernhard Schobinger has createdover the last forty-five years. It is designed as a reference work and documents nearly half a decade of the Swiss object artist’s design and creative power. In short accompanying texts,Schobinger himself explains the evolutionary history of many of his objects and his very personal artistic motivation for them. The reader can also gain additional insight into the creative process in the form of sketches and pages from his original notebook.

Bernhard Schobinger (winner of the Grand Prix Design 2007) is one of the most provocative, critical and artistically inspiring contemporary jewellery artists. He has revolutionised his profession. Through the eschewal of traditional jewels, he deprives jewellery of its function as a status symbol, making it a tool of expression within a universal critical language.

Text in English

Exhibition:
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (UK), until 19 October 2014
www.manchestergalleries.org-2016-2016