WINFRIED KRÜGER

Overview

Winfried Krüger’s work is modest and non-conformist within the context of contemporary art jewellery. Now, for the first time, his diverse jewellery series are presented in an extensive monograph and narrate the development of his own unique jewellery language.

Winfried Krüger (born 1944) belongs to that generation of jewellery artists who witnessed the birth of avant-garde jewellery in the 1960s. The skilled goldsmith liberated himself from precision, fineness and other virtues of his craft in order to allow free rein to his creativity. He does not, however, defer to art jewellery; rather he moves freely and skilfully between jewellery, drawing, painting and staging. With technical sophistication he implements his ideas, with the wearability of his pieces assuming subordination.

For Krüger jewellery is ever-present. From the tread of a shoe via the launch pad of a firework to the set of a science fiction film – he finds inspiration in all of these things. He even knows how to translate shadows, silhouetted against their surroundings, into metal. Extraordinary artworks are then created, which in the examination of ideas, form, materiality and surface show a modern, innovative understanding of jewellery, which he has imparted to his students over twenty years as lecturer at the technical college for design in Pforzheim.

Nonetheless, Winfried Krüger has, as far as publishing his work is concerned, played hard to get. For the very first time the now available monograph presents the artist’s work in a comprehensive retrospective, whose focus rests on the work from the last twenty years.

With contributions by Cornelie Holzach, Sigrid Kopittke, Barbara Maas and Ralf-Rainer Odenwald, foreword by Marie-José van den Hout.