We are all aware of the transformations jewellery went through in the last few years, with pieces switching purposes and turning from decorative objects to examples of wearable art. The trend is not new, though, and the history of fashion has witnessed jewellery designers quite often collaborating with artists and developing exclusive pieces suspended between art and fashion.
Artistic movements also inspired unique pieces: kinetic art for example introduced into jewellery a sense of dynamic motion. Max Bill, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko focused in their early mobiles on rhythm, rotations and planes, while Alexander Calder perfected the technique becoming widely recognised for his mobile constructions. As the years passed and kinetic art evolved, some historians came to consider Op Art as a derivation of kinetic art, though in the case of the former movement was generated by optical illusions.
Engine fitter and aeronautical engineer Friedrich Becker (1922-1997) is considered among the pioneers of kinetic jewellery. A professor at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, he had his first solo exhibition of jewellery in 1966 in London. A prolific jeweller, he often combined synthetic stones with stainless steel producing modern pieces in which elements would move.
Italy had its own kinetic/optical artists such as Getulio Alviani who often collaborated with fashion designer Germana Marucelli and, as higlighted in another post, GEM Montebello, a house that produced pieces in collaboration with several artists, among them also Edival Ramosa, who created gold and anodized aluminium kinetic pendants for GianCarlo Montebello's label.
Seminal abstract sculptor and jeweller Giorgio Pomodoro, better known as Giò Pomodoro (1930-2002), worked with empty spaces and geometries, tackling themes such as tension and torque, and using specific recurring symbols like the Sun.
Pomodoro created for Cinzia Ruggeri in 1968 this unique piece, a bracelet-cum-ring. The structure is based on integrated unbalance, precision and simplicity of forms.
A slight movement of the hand sets the piece into motion and allows the bracelet to symbolically move nearer to the ring. This dynamic mechanism means the piece could be attribute to kinetic art, even though the bi-coloured patterns that characterise some of its parts link it to Op Art and the badger fur at the top of it is a reference to shaving brushes and calls to mind Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim's "Surrealist Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)", a cup and saucer entirely covered in gazelle fur.
In a nutshell, this unique piece (yes, there is only one of these in the world) reunites different artistic movements together. Trivia but fun story connected with it: apparently Ruggeri used to wear it with a Paco Rabanne metal dress, an absolutely perfect match with such a piece.
There are still quite a few designers out there working along these lines: Chus Burés has for instance developed pieces with different artists including Miquel Barceló, Jesús Soto, Antoni Miralda, Paul McCarthy and Louise Bourgeois, and designed original pieces Pedro Almodóvar's films including Matador (1986) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Átame, 1990). But this is another story that we will hopefully tell in another post.
Image credits for this post: third image in this post courtesy/copyright Cinzia Ruggeri.
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