The Fat Booty of Madness. The Jewellery Department at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich

Sheer madness – a new book on Otto Künzli’s jewellery class at Munich Art Academy

Emotional, provocative, conceptual, imaginative, risky, profound, crazy, obstinate, colourful, strict, personal, sophisticated, playful – the jewellery class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich shows itself to be multi-faceted, unconventional in the extreme and undogmatic. Since 1991 the class has been taught by Professor Otto Künzli, a Swiss goldsmith.

At ARNOLDSCHE, the international publishers for contemporary auteur jewellery, a compendious book has just come off the presses – to mark the occasion of the exhibition mounted at the Neue Sammlung in Munich to celebrate the bicentenary of the Art Academy – covering the work of current and former Künzli students since 1991. This new publication reflects the diversity of their work in over 1,000 illustrations.

The students of this Swiss professor certainly do not come from Germany alone; artists in jewellery converge on Munich from Korea, Australia, Japan, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and the US. Diversity which has grown out of the heterogeneity of all those distinctive cultures. A balance between individuality and community informs the spirit of the Künzli class, which is renowned worldwide.

Essays by Maribel Königer, Ellen Maurer Zilioli and Otto Künzli himself as well as a foreword by Florian Hufnagl introduce the subject matter and make it abundantly clear that the current generation of art jewellery is not at all behind other aesthetic disciplines nowadays. On the contrary, it “has long since abandoned the antiquated commitment to beauty” (Maurer Zilioli) yet, in so doing, has retained its distinguishing quality: the “specific link between the object and that human being that is uniquely peculiar to jewellery” (Otto Künzli). 


The Fat Booty of Madness
The Jewellery Department at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich