Robert Smit is one of my favourite jewellers, I love how he uses gold sheet, lots of it. Sometimes his work is really graphic, with pigment painted onto the gold sheet.
images from the Jewels of Mind and Mentality Exhibition catalogue , 2000
If you live in melbourne you can see some of his work in the Unexpected Pleasures exhibition at NGV International until the end of August - a huge exhibition of international jewellers. Its pretty dark and moody in the exhibition and easy to miss some work.
Delft, The Netherlands born 1941
Bello's presence V 2003
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Decorative Arts and Design, Jewellery, gold, silver, zinc, paint
14.8 h x 14.5 w x 0.7 d cm
Purchased 2005
Accession No: NGA 2005.353
Photographer: Robert Smit
Robert Smit’s jewellery acknowledges gold’s tradition as a medium of exchange and its historical role in Dutch prosperity, but he subverts these references with an approach to design and surface that links his work to the country’s more recent history of experimental design and art. The organisation of colour fields and the constructivist flavour of Smit’s work has references to the japonisme of Van Gogh, the rationalist abstractions of Mondrian, and the artists and designers of De Stijl. The influence of the COBRA art movement of the 1950s is also evident in his gestural use of saturated colour. By painting over the meticulously crafted gold structure of Bello’s presence V, then scoring through the surface to reveal patches of the precious material beneath, Smit practices a form of reverse alchemy, negating the expressive qualities of gold and the symbolic power of its display. Importantly, Smit leaves the reverse of the piece unpainted, to cast its richness and lustre privately back on to the wearer rather than towards the viewer.
Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010
Sleeping Beauty by Robert Smit, ca.1990, gold pendant and chain.