Opening: 23 November – 6:30 – 8:30 pm Elisabetta Cipriani is delighted to announce Pommes de Jong, the first wearable art exhibition in London of the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong. The Pommes de Jong is an ongoing project that came to life in 2007 in Bouan (Bourbonnais, France) where in the mid 1990’s de Jong and her husband Tom Weyland decided to buy a house. She created a vegetable garden and they planted potatoes in memory of the lack of food during the war. De Jong stored the potatoes in a 13th Century cellar and suddenly realized that she was fascinated by the huge number of sprouts that were growing from the shrunk tubers. When de Jong was asked by a jewellery collector to make a jewel for her, she thought that she might do something with these shrunk potatoes and their sprouts that were getting longer and longer. Having flowers and seeds growing above the ground and the roots underground, de Jong is fascinated by the enigmatic nature of these tubers. The artist finds in them an erotic shade thinking about the potato flower and what she calls the ‘potato balls’ that contain the seeds. De Jong specifically […]

Elisabetta Cipriani is delighted to present Game, a new gallery project by Adel Abdessemed.  Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of ‘fatal beauty’, Abdessemed created a chain bracelet and a pair of earrings made of an accumulation of white gold laser-cut razor blades.  Game encapsulates the notion of fatal beauty by being both lethal and attractive in its appearance. It provides the person who will wear it with a complex interplay between being threatened and at the same time reassured by its beauty. Through its complex identity, Game draws from Abdessemed’s artistic practice, in which he consistently blends elements of beauty and brutality. Developing an artistic vision from text, images and life, Abdessemed engages with the flaws and contradictions of the contemporary world. As the artist states: “My art makes no claim at representing reality, but simply a touching reality.” 

WEARABLE ART: ARTIST-MADE JEWELLERY TRANSFORMS THE WEARER INTO A WALKING WORK OF ART Friday May 20 2016, 3:00 @ Art16, Olympia – London Panel: Elisabetta Cipriani, Stephen Webster MBE, Andrew Logan, Didier Haspeslagh, moderated by Harriet Quick Collectable, covetable and (relatively) affordable, artist-made jewellery is the millenial art-lover’s must-have, but what is behind its sudden surge in popularity? From Alexander Calder and Yves Tanguy, who both made earrings for the ground-breaking collector Peggy Guggenheim, in 1942, to Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray, artists have long-regarded jewellery as small-form sculpture. They tended to produce pieces as one-offs for their most loyal patrons but, recently, galleries devoted to wearable art have sprung up and are commissioning the world’s top contemporary artists to create these dimuitive works. Always tactile, sometimes kinetic or emitting tiny sounds, the pieces are all about an intimate relationship between the artist, the work and the wearer – the artist’s imaginary woman come to life.

Elisabetta Cipriani is pleased to announce a new collaborative project with renowned Italian artist Enrico Castellani. Nastro (1963-2016) is an exclusive jewel made from 18kt yellow satin gold that can be worn either as a brooch or as a necklace. The artist has created an edition of ten pieces, on show and available  at Elisabetta Cipriani gallery, London from 29 February 2016. Enrico Castellani is regarded as one of Italy’s most important living artists. The new work Nastro can be located within the artist’s wider practice in the way in which it expresses Castellani’s consistent poetical engagement with the manipulation of surfaces and light, evident here in the elegant bending of a single strip plate into an intriguing anthropomorphic shape. Nastro has a connection with Castellani’s personal history, first coming to life in 1963 when the artist decided to design and create a gift for his then partner, a token of love that the recipient has kept with her ever since. The piece embodies a more unconventional aesthetic than Superficie, a jewellery collaboration between Cipriani and Castellani realised in 2012, which exhibits the artist’s characteristic relief surfaces as seen in the Castellani celebrated series of work Superficie Nera (1959). About Enrico Castellani […]