The Big Red ring. Courtesy Suzanne Syz
London's Frieze week showed how, year on year, jewelry is infiltrating the art and design world, so much so that this year's PAD London—the 12th edition and arguably the strongest to date—was extravagantly embellished with jewels, jewelers and jewelry galleries.
Inside the tented pavilion in Berkeley Square, Hemmerle, the Munich-based, family-owned and run jeweler celebrating their 125th anniversary in 2018, set their inimitable jewels as works of art in a contemporary, architectural booth designed by Tom Postma, their long-time collaborator. However distinctive their style, Hemmerle always come up with surprises: here, their signature Harmony bangle, with its linear-yet fluid open-ended silhouette and ingeniously engineered hinge, became an openwork blackened silver and iron cage, cellular in form, inside which shimmered a landscape of reverse-set white diamonds.
Harmony bangle and Seven Gods of Fortune earrings. Courtesy Hemmerle
Often Hemmerle's modernism is balanced with echoes of the past, with antique cameos or Egyptian fragments. A pair of stylized girandole-form earrings were draped with antique Japanese porcelain plaques depicting portraits of the Seven Gods of Fortune, suspended from blackened silver bamboo frames, their faces turned towards the wearer, promising riches and treasures, both worldly and spiritual.
There was more black magic at Lorenz Baümer, the Paris-based designer-jeweler whose display ranged through his favorite inspirations including architecture, bestiary and the beating heart. The Black Magic series sets vibrant colored gemstones, one of Baümer's specialties, against radiant black backgrounds, dynamic rays of black diamonds and black rhodium-plated gold, creating an electric charge of color, darkness, light and texture. The bestiary was centred on a scarab beetle brooch, whose wings fly open at the touch of a yellow diamond, revealing a body sculpted in a new gold alloy which can be impregnated with perfume. A multi-sensory jewelry experience.
Scarabee Automne brooch. Courtesy Lorenz Baümer
Glenn Spiro of "G" London offered up his signature flamboyant extravaganzas, conjured around exceptional stones and barrier-breaking craftsmanship. Recently, he too has incorporated antique fragments and ancient Bactrian and Mesopotamian agates into this jewels. In a similar spirit, a highlight here was a dramatic necklace, redesigned into contemporary style, by "G" from a diamond necklace, of 1902, composed of important old-mine cut stones, which originally belonged to Helen Hay Whitney.
By contrast, Walid Akkad, Lebanese jeweler based in Paris who was new to PAD London this year, demonstrated his resolutely modern minimalist style, the pared-down yet monumental rings and bangles, all architectural design-driven concepts in which materials and craftsmanship are seamlessly and effortlessly integrated.
The imaginative display...not only channeled the emotion of jewels but also emphasized the strong jewelry presence at PAD of individualist, inventive female designers.
Swiss designer-jeweler Suzanne Syz was in a particularly whimsical mood in her Alice in Wonderland-themed booth. This provided the perfect setting for her fantasy jewels, notably the Shop Til You Drop fruit basket earrings, woven baskets sculpted in titanium, overflowing with luscious enameled fruits, studded with tourmalines and diamonds. Syz always pushes boundaries of technique and material, and out of her pink velvet jewel box, she pulled massive yet light-as-air Twist earrings, the pink-toned aluminum complemented with kunzites and a bombé ring made of red sapphire glass embedded with "fancy" or icy diamonds, contrasting fire and ice, sheen and shine.
Shop Til You Drop earrings and The Big Red ring. Courtesy Suzanne Syz
Valery Demure hosted a curated jewelry gallery, Objet d'Èmotion, showcasing the work of contemporary designer-jewelers from around the world, including Swiss-born, London-based Cora Sheibani, whose graphic-yet-playful jewels balance storytelling with line, form, material and texture; Polly Wales' sculptural, organic designs; Alice Cicolini's Indian-inspired enamels that here framed dramatic Muzo Colombian emeralds set into long earrings; Ioanna Souflia's statuesque marble creations; Melanie Georgacopoulos lustrous mother of pearl creations; Silvia Furmanovich, who evokes the luscious natural wonders of her native Brazil; and Geneva-based Nadia Morgenthaler, whose exquisitely refined earrings balance unprecedented structure with a romantic flavor of the antique. The imaginative display, changed daily, not only channeled the emotion of jewels but also emphasized the strong jewelry presence at PAD of individualist, inventive female designers.
Group of jewels courtesy Cora Sheibani
This was a theme, along with the fusion of past and present, that played out in the booths of two female gallerists: Frederique Mattei of Ma Tei Paris sources ancient beads and tribal elements which she reconfigures into powerful contemporary, ethnic-inspired jewels. Her dramatic necklaces recall the rituals so associated with jewelry, creating dialogues not only between tradition and modernity but between cultures and civilizations. Karry Berreby, also from Paris, mixes vintage and contemporary jewelry, using her eye and taste to build a cohesive collection characterized by audacity and originality. Her speciality in vintage is signed, 20th-century jewelry, including seminal 1960s, '70s and '80s jewels by Bulgari and David Webb and striking Piaget watches from the 1970s. Her contemporary jewels on offer are equally striking—including theatrical enameled butterfly earrings by Berreby herself and other artist jewels, hand-wrought, in gilded bronze, resonating with a primal, tribal strength.
Finally, Siegelson, New York dealer specializing in 20th-century masterpieces, set the tone for female creativity in jewelry, with exceptional jewels by Suzanne Belperron, a trailblazer, independent and individualistic, whose designs remain timelessly modern and relevant to today's discerning jewelry devotees. Among the many highlights at Siegelson was a stunning modernist mid-1920s brooch by Gerard Sandoz, a leader of a generation of artist-jewelers, whose radical, machine-age jewels so perfectly captured their moment in time. Designed as an abstract composition of pure line and form, geometric and mechanistic, the brooch is a perfect composition too of tone and texture, a template for all modernism. In the 1920s, Sandoz's jewels were worn by the first generation of independent, audacious women, women who worked, drove, and broke taboos.
George Sandoz brooch. Courtesy Siegelson
Today this modernist masterpiece is treasured as an icon of 20th-century jewelry design and the most perfect expression of the kind of bold, confident femininity that chimes with today's mood of female empowerment.