Sympathy

Doerthe Fuchs always makes her pieces in series, thus creating socalled jewelry families. The titles of her creations reveal her preferences and her worldview, which is very complex and highly imaginative, full of memories, constantly evolving and continually changing. A few of her titles could be translated as Little Doodle Floret, A Home of One’s Own, Construction Site and Partner Dance, each of which she has observed and experienced firsthand. Although blackened silver is the material of choice for this Munich-based jewelry artist, her cosmos also includes paper wrappers from chewing gum, glasses for red wine, tin cans, remnants of pelts, mirrors, coins, glass eyeballs, newspaper, beef bones, a hedgehog’s quills and bones, a fox’s teeth, seashells, coral branches and the cast of a lizard’s head. Each material and each piece of jewelry tells a story that’s sometimes a bit nostalgic, sometimes somewhat intimate, but always very personal.

Doerthe Fuchs, Necklace, 2010. Silver, amethyst

Beate Brinkmann’s exhibition Sympathie will present pieces by this artist from Munich together with creations by Svenja John from Berlin. For the past twenty years, her preferred material has been the polycarbonate Makrolon™. During this time, she has gradually developed her own Jewelry Construction Kit. At the beginning, there were only boneshaped parts (x-bones), which she conxd with rings of various sizes to create chains, earrings and bracelets. Over the years, more than ten different basic elements were developed, from which all of the complex jewelry assemblies are plugged together. All of these two-dimensional parts are designed with the aid of a CAD program and afterwards cut by water jet from a flat sheet of Makrolon™. A playful design and assembly process transforms these beans, bones, butterflies, buoys, racquets or rockets into complex three-dimensional jewelry creations. From time to time, the Svenja John’s Jewelry Construction Kit is expanded to include another element in order to enable her to create new and crazier designs and, of course, to further increase the pleasure she derives from tinkering.