Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery presents Liens d’Amour, the final piece created by Sophia Vari, opening on 20 May 2026, three years after the artist’s passing. The exhibition celebrates Vari’s legacy through her last wearable sculpture, conceived shortly before her death. Completed in 2023, Liens d’Amour is a necklace made of ebony, 18kt yellow gold, and vivid orange-red coral. Produced in an edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs, the work encapsulates the sculptural vocabulary that defined Vari’s career, translated into a portable form that maintains the ambition, material presence, and formal integrity of her large-scale sculptures. One of the most technically complex works Vari ever realised, Liens d’Amour required over six months of development to achieve controlled mobility. Its sophisticated construction allows the wearable sculpture to move fluidly on the body, reflecting her lifelong exploration of balance, gravity, and motion. For the first time, the exhibition presents the complete creative process behind the work, including the plastiline prototype modelled by Vari shortly before she was hospitalised, alongside her original drawings and maquettes. These materials offer rare insight into her working process and artistic discipline during the final phase of her life. Departing from her customary references to mythology, Greek dances, and islands, Vari titled this final […]

  Cosmic Jewelry by Sheila Hicks Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery is honoured to unveil Cosmic Jewelry during the opening of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia at the Monaco & Grand Canal Hotel in Venice (6–10 May 2026). Marking the first collection of unique jewellery by Sheila Hicks, who for over seven decades has conducted fibre into a language of emotion, tension, and living colour. Throughout her career, Hicks has treated thread as architecture and colour as structure. Her works, whether monumental installations or intimate compositions, breathe with an internal rhythm: soft yet disciplined, spontaneous yet precise. In her hands, fibre becomes both material and metaphor. Conceived over two years through a close dialogue between the artist, Atelier L & L (Louise Zanartu & Louis Boudart), and Elisabetta Cipriani, the collection brings together one-of-a-kind pendants and brooches in gold and silver, where silk, cotton and linen entwine with pearls, minerals, stones, and fragments of precious metal. These adornments carry the joyous, chromatic intensity and tactile immediacy of larger sculptures, while enhancing their intimate, sensual essence. Cosmic Jewellery draws inspiration from two central forms in Hicks’ practice: the sculptural Boules and the intimate Minimes. The Boules, spheres composed of threads wrapped around a core often formed from garments once belonging […]

Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery is pleased to present The First Encounter, opening on Wednesday 25th February from 6–8 PM, a group exhibition bringing together 35 contemporary artists in a focused exploration of one of the most ancient and immediate gestures of adornment: wearing something close to the face. Earrings are perhaps the most relational form of jewelry. They do not inhabit the body silently or discreetly — they move, reflect light, respond to expression, and participate in conversation. Existing in constant dialogue with the face, the gaze, and the presence of the wearer, they are often the first jewel perceived when meeting someone — a detail that becomes language. For more than 4,000 years, earrings have traversed cultures and civilizations as symbols of protection, power, identity, and belonging. Positioned close to the eyes and the voice, they occupy a uniquely communicative space between object and expression. In today’s world — shaped by images, screens, and visual communication — this dimension is amplified. The face has returned to the center of daily experience, and with it, earrings regain renewed expressive urgency. They are immediate, intimate, and personal — capable of transforming presence through a minimal yet powerful gesture. The First Encounter assembles […]

Elisabetta Cipriani on Artist Jewellery as Wearable Art and Collectible Design At Teatro Palladio, Elisabetta Cipriani took part in Coded Couture – Jewelry as Cultural Code in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, an event organised by Trendvision Jewellery + Forecasting. Invited to speak on the role of jewelry in contemporary culture, Cipriani was tasked with presenting artist jewellery as a field of artistic, conceptual, and craft experimentation—one that today sits firmly within the realm of wearable art and collectible design. Drawing on over fifteen years of curatorial practice at her eponymous London gallery, founded in 2009, Elisabetta Cipriani articulated a vision in which jewelry transcends adornment to become a form of visual art. Italian by birth and British by adoption, she has consistently invited internationally renowned contemporary artists to create projects that explore the body as a site of meaning, transformation, and intimacy. “The jewelry I present tells a story—an idea, a connection between the artist and the material. The intention is to communicate the value of creations that are expressions of visual art, to be appreciated as much as a sculpture or a painting.” During her talk, Cipriani traced the evolution of artist jewellery from experimental studio practice to […]