Peter Skubic – Nothing Behind

Born in 1935, Peter Skubic has numbered among the most important figures in contemporary art jewelry since the 1970s. For an exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne in 2011, he was quoted as having said that making jewelry is “an experiment, a sculptural or performative statement, a bodily activity, the crossing of a boundary, and a creative act of liberation.”

Peter Skubic, brooch, 2010. Stainless steel, lacquer, sheet gold

This Austrian jewelry maker participated in the Body Alchemy exhibition in Hangzhou, China in 2015. Now at the Munich Jewelry Week 2016, his angular and radically minimalistic pieces are on display at Gallery Isabella Hund. A new series, which he entitled nothing behind, features glossy plates of stainless steel pierced with round or elongated oval holes. “My doctor insisted that I had to swallow some pills, and afterwards I was inspired by their empty packages,” the artist explains. The brooches are a variant of his invisible theme. Clarifying his quality criteria as curator of the special Jewelry 2016 show at the Crafts Fair, Peter Skubic says,“I prefer crossover artists to boring traditionalists and I’ve favored jewelry artists whose views are similar to mine. I didn’t consider decorative, nice, pretty jewelry. After all, it’s a difficult task to choose fewer than 10% of the 720 applicants to participate in Jewelry 2016. Basically, it’s very unfair.”