Get ready for a month full of jewels in a city that is a jewel: Florence. From 20 June to 21 July Preziosa returns, the seventh edition of the exhibition dedicated to contemporary research jewelery organized by Lao (Le Arti Orafe Jewelery School), curated by Maria Cristina Bergesio. Preziosa 2013 was organized at the Marino Marini Museum and is divided into three sections: Un Certain Regard, just like in Cannes, with six international artists (Karin Seufert, Philip Sajet, Suska Mackert, David Bielander, Sophie Hanagarth, Sigurt Bronger), Symbiosis which offers 12 photos by Eva Sauer, and Preziosa Young, dedicated to eight young emerging artists. This year’s theme is the gaze of the spectator. That is, what are the expectations and preconceptions of the common imagination with respect to contemporary jewellery. What do we expect to find in a necklace, in fact? Be careful, the exhibition is for refined palates, you won’t find the most common shapes: it hosts the small lawn on the border between ornament and creativity. So much so that to guide the public, Un Certain Regard was created with three thematic sections: Codex ornamenta, which hosts Suska Mackert’s research on jewelery as a social code, with photos, videos, books and installations. The section To be or not to be? instead it presents works in which materials, techniques and forms from the history of jewelery are reworked. Finally, the section What I see is what I see! proposes three different languages characterized by a strong visual impact on the viewer.
The photographic project Symbiosis was born as a thematic corollary of the exhibition “Un certain regard”, and is therefore strongly related to it. The Florentine artist Eva Sauer, active between Italy and Germany, created 12 images to visualize the jewel on the body and relate it to particular places in the city: famous museums and cultural institutions, but also private residences and glimpses of peripheral urban landscapes . The result obtained is that of photos in which the suggestion and interpretation of the content of the jewel have been developed by the artist around the people who wear it, but above all the particular atmospheres and peculiarities of the chosen places.
Then there is the parallel exhibition Preziosa Young, in which the works of eight emerging artists will be presented, selected from over 200 participants from all over the world: Karin Roy Andersson, Wan Hee Cho, Rob Elford, Benedikt Fischer, Panjapol Kulpapangkorn, Chiara Scarpitti, Antje Stolz, Lauren Vanessa Tickle.
