Georg Dobler: Schmuck/Jewellery 1980-2010

Composition of Dreams – Geometry and Nature in the Jewellery of Georg Dobler 

In the middle of the 1980s, when Georg Dobler began to cast natural forms in silver and made leaf structures, vine tendrils and blossoming branches the main theme in his jewellery, the lack of understanding of the contemporary jewellery scene was rife. Decorative elements were judged all too quickly as superficial and old-fashioned. However, as Naturalism was considered anachronistic at that time, so Georg Dobler became a pioneer for the generation of subsequent and present-day jewellery designers.

His casts of exotic plants and beetles are complemented with large cut stones, which were also unusual for the time. The radiant citrine’s shades, which range from yellow to orange, and the delicate purple-coloured amethysts enter into colourful play with the dark metal surfaces. It is iridescent black rather than silveriness that belongs to Dobler’s signature style. The huge dark shells of the stag- dung- and rhinoceros beetles emit a genuinely charming sparkle, which – although less delicate and romantic - evoke the repertoire of forms from the Jugendstil period.

In addition to the natural forms, geometry and abstraction are two central themes of the artist’s œvre. Frameworks from stainless steel, black chrome, and silver remind us of Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malewitsch. To this day Dobler captures and continues to develop the language of form from the geometry which determined his early works. The seemingly disparate poles of his creations, where Naturalism and abstraction meet, become particularly exciting: rectangular-composed coloured surfaces can relate to either branches or spongy entities. Oxidised photos on papier-mâché evoke rocks or whole mountain ranges, and a coral branch can suddenly become entangled in a geometric barbed-wire framework.

In his versatility, his daring jewellery reveals, again and again, the relationships behind which the individual and self-assured identity of the “structure and form collector” artist Georg Dobler becomes visible.