Jewellery art market: artists with an eye for jewellery
Thousands of pounds’ worth of jewellery by top artists including Dali, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor is about to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s for charity.
By Colin Gleadell Last Updated: 5:33PM GMT 19 Dec 2008
Eye eye: Dali’s eye of Time brooch, on sale for £20,000
Four of the world’s top living artists who have experimented with making jewellery have donated examples that will be sold for charity at Sotheby’s tomorrow. Artists give works to charity all the time, but this is the first occasion on which these artists have taken part in a jewellery sale.
Among the Cartier and Bulgari diamond necklaces, brooches and earrings on show today are a silver charm bracelet by Damien Hirst (£12,000 to £17,000); a 22-carat gold-and-enamel ring by Anish Kapoor, with a void where a stone would normally be placed (£15,000 to £20,000); a gilded cuff bangle shaped like intertwined fingers by Louise Bourgeois (£25,000 to £30,000); and a ruby-and-diamond pendant by Subodh Gupta, the star of the new Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery (£20,000 to £25,000).
For Joanna Hardy, Sotheby’s jewellery expert, the auction “marks an extremely exciting development in the recognition of unique jewellery as art”.
As such, it is building on the little-charted tradition of jewellery-making by earlier 20th-century artists who worked primarily as painters or sculptors. Picasso and Braque both made jewellery late in their careers, as did the Surrealists Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim. During the Sixties and Seventies, the Italian goldsmith GianCarlo Montebello worked with a number of contemporary artists, such as Lucio Fontana and Niki de St Phalle.