In the 1950s and 1960s, the Academies of Fine Arts in countries like Germany, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Italy began to exploit the expertise of great innovators, who shared the uses of modernity with painters and sculptors. During this period, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich became the epicentre of world jewellery, presided over by Franz Rickert, Hermann Jünger and Otto Künzli. The Bavarian academy is now considered the real birthplace of signature jewellery, together with Amsterdam’s Rietveld Academie, founded in 1968. It is worth recalling that in Catalonia the Escola Massana promoted jewellery as an artistic discipline in 1950, on the initiative of Manuel Capdevila, Ana Font and Ramon Puig Cuyàs.
The Klimt02 gallery, the only one in Spain to focus exclusively on contemporary jewellery, has been reaping the fruits of the great European schools for three years. With exquisite delicacy, its directors, Leo Caballero and Amador Bertomeu, have put together the collection entitled The Beauty and the Best, made up of 140 works by 26 first-rate artists. The concept is based on the idea that Beauty goes beyond the ornamental: “The aim is to collect what is well done and is essential; what is Good is the selection of works on the basis of what makes you think and feel good”, they state.
All the authors in the Klimt02 collection have their own artistic language. The German artist Gésine Hackenberg creates small still lives in Danish glass while paying tribute to the paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries. For her Room Service project, the Dutch artist Manon van Kouswijk creates painstaking white ceramic pieces with pearls, wood and plastics that are transformed into a family heirloom, an object of exchange, a memory or a souvenir. Sari Liimatta designs apparently innocent objects with rubber toys, plastic pearls, needles and glass from her native Finland; a real challenge for the surrealist imagination. The Swiss artist David Bielander uses an ironic approach to short circuit traditional formal models on the basis of unusual materials; the material that he uses to simulate meat in his necklaces/Viennese sausages, bratwurst and weisswurst comes from Thonet chairs. A true neo-dadaist. The situationism of the French artist Benjamin Lignel leads him to come up with brooches that are nipples, silver ears created by taking a mould of the user’s own ears, and gold and silver rings in the form of band-aids. In her Beautiful City series of necklaces, Anheléis Planteydet, another Dutch artist, recreates imaginary house plans: they are necklaces structured into two stages; the invention stage and that of putting the jewel on. As such, the house becomes inhabited by a body - or the house inhabits a cleavage.
On another tack and using a different device, the Worth vs. Waste collective, at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, has come up with the concept of appropriating an everyday object: the garbage bag. Two years ago, the Portuguese curator Ana Cardim sent an e-mail to ninety selected artists and designers asking them to create a metal structure pin incorporating a small transparent plastic bag with a small kit of spares, enabling the bag to be replaced each time that the jewel was used. In these garbage pins a fine material clashes with a material that is an enemy of the planet. For those behind this travelling exhibition, this is not about turning garbage into something provocative or “de-aestheticising” art but rather it aims to blur the boundaries between creation and other artistic practices, such as advertising, comics, jewellery or photography.
In the exhibition catalogue Martí Perán goes much further, stating that these pieces “turn the surplus of experience into a treasure”. For the art critic this is about “understanding life by turning its caducity into a jewel”. A new function of art in its incessant desire to merge with life: compiling the surplus of experience for the museum of hidden treasures. Institutional criticism or simply garbage?

The Beauty and the Best. Klimt02 Gallery, 2010 Collection. Carrer Còrsega, 317, pral. 2a. Barcelona. Opens on 17th December. www.klimt02.net

Garbage Pin Project. Worth vs. Waste. Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. La Rambla, 7. Barcelona. Curator: Ana Cardim.