The Real Thing - The Aegte Vare. Jewellery and Objects by Kim Buck

Hearts, flowers, signets, crosses: Kim Buck (*1957) has a predilection for classic jewellery motifs. It would seem as though his goldsmith‘s training has informed him for all eternity. Yet only at first glance. For instead of simply always repeating the same thing in varying forms, he has made it his duty to explore the motifs in an artistic way: mostly with humour, always considered and sometimes downright caustically.

With surprising combinations and plays on words, he questions conventions of the jewellery industry as well as the (inflationary) use of national and religious symbols. He stops at nothing – not even the Daisy brooch, the Danes’ national jewellery. His preoccupation with the question of what jewellery is, what it can be, or what we as wearers expect from it includes the play with materiality: noble metals are cast in simple acrylic and sawn up, while ordinary quartz stones are worked and integrated as wood or cork would be. And what looks like infl atable rubber turns out to be high-carat gold.

With Kim Buck, material, form and content are always inextricably linked. His Inflated series is evidence of this, not only from a technical and design standpoint; words such as ‘puffed up’ or ‘hot air’ open up realms of association that play with the sensibilities of jewellery enthusiasts as much as with art industry customs. Because the rings in the series quickly lose their form as well as their ‘puffed up’ character through use, the wearers take over an active role in this process.

Even in the title, the book, which Søren Darmstedt designed so fittingly, plays with the demarcation between irony and sincerity. Ultimately what The Real Thing is, is in many contexts up for debate. For the Conceptual artist the most important thing above all is to be thought-provoking.
The issues raised by Kim Buck through jewellery and objects examine value, ethics and social status and thus migrate from the realm of jewellery. They shake up our established ways of thinking and, perhaps best of all, leave us amazed.