Julia Obermaier, Kaori Juzu and Gabi Veit

The galleries staging auteurjewelry exhibitions to coincide with Munich’s International Crafts Fair include the Galerie tal20, which provides a platform for established and young emerging artists alike. This year’s joint exhibition, featuring Julia Obermaier, Germany, Kaori Juzu, Japan/Denmark and Gabi Veit from South Tyrol, promises to make for a multifaceted experience. Julia Obermaier, who studied in Neugablonz and Idar-Oberstein, creates geometrical bodies from agate and rock crystal slices, as well as silver. She regards the resulting hollow spaces enclosed by angles and corners as “a kind of spiritual space for the wearer’s feelings and emotions that protects the sensitive contents like a second skin.”

Julia Obermaier, ring Getting close(d). Agate, silver.

Kaori Juzu, who was born in Japan, trained as a goldsmith in Denmark. Later on, she also did a few stints as an artist-in-residence in Penland, North Carolina, and Erfurt, Thuringia. Her jewelry creations owe their unique aura to their delicately enameled, pastel-colored surfaces that also reference their immediate surroundings or the natural world, such as, e.g., “the moon’s shimmering reflection on a water surface – gently undulating or tranquil, yet sufficiently in motion to take shape and come to life.”

Kaori Juzu, brooch From the Hidden Side of the Moon #5. Enamel, steel, copper, silver.

Kaori Juzu, brooch From the Hidden Side of the Moon #2.Enamel, steel, magnet.

The jewelry and spoons created by Gabi Veit have been inspired by her observing flowers and rocks, trees and mountains, water and wind, motion and stillness. With her “Fragments” jewelry line, she celebrates “the rough and jagged outlines of the mountains and rocks of South Tyrol, my ever-changing, multifaceted home region.” Gabi Veit refers to her spoons, which she calls “creatura”, as “possible and at the same time improbable figures” that all have a personality all their own. “They have a head and a body, they are handle and leg, they are flower, fruit and leaf.” Her spoons made of blackened silver are one-of-a-kind pieces for scooping sugar or salt, fruit, seeds or herbs.