Jewelry+Image

The collection of artistic jewelery in the GRASSI Museum Leipzig spans the period from the mid-20th century to the present day. Works by Erich Lenné and Otto Scharge bear witness to the first awakening. At the same time, jewelery design was established as a course at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Applied Sciences in Halle under Renate Heintze and Dorothea Prühl – an artistic niche that was unique in the GDR. After reunification, international items and a series of donations completed the collection.

The objects prove the gradual emancipation of the jewelery design as an author: interior decoration, in which the artistic idea can take precedence over the processing of high-quality material. Some of the objects therefore also contain “base” materials such as rubber, carbon, plastic or textiles. However, the range of what jewelry can be is very wide. There are ingeniously simple design solutions as well as conceptual jewelery that tells or questions stories and for which background knowledge is helpful or sometimes even necessary.

But what would brooches, rings and necklaces be without the people who wear them? Jewelry can only be realised on the body, as a representation of the self and/or as a symbol of perception to the outside world. For the book, Leipzig photographers photographed personalities who are connected to the GRASSI Museum in a wide variety of ways with a piece of jewelry they had chosen.

The present publication gives the example of around 180 jewelery artists an insight into the multifaceted collection of the GRASSI Museum. The essay by curator Sabine Epple and an e-mail dialogue between experts Ellen Maurer Zilioli and Renate Luckner-Bien introduce the collection and contemporary jewelry history. An inventory catalog at the end of the book, with short biographies of all jewelery artists represented in the collection, also makes the publication – which appears on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in the GRASSI Museum Leipzig – a valuable reference work.