The jewellery by Ute Eitzenhöfer is extravagant in many respects. It can be light, happy, pale, sensual and reassuring, but also heavy, dark, angry, provocative and brutal. Yet one thing is clear: despite their apparent superficiality, intrinsic beauty is a profound criterion.
Eitzenhöfer handles diverse materials with the precision of a goldsmith and with artistic largesse in equal measure: synthetic canisters, gold, pieces of wood, diamonds, precious stones and rocks. The work with gemstones in particular has, since her professorship at the University of Applied Sciences in Idar-Oberstein, a particular value in her oeuvre. For Eitzenhöfer it is not the superficial promise of happiness from the glitz and sparkle but rather the tempus fugit, the eternal in the stone in relation to human existence that is a central principle.
Despite exceptional autonomy in terms of object, her works are not conceived for the showcase, but as jewellery that is only complete when worn on the body. A prominent dialogue is what it is about: a critical yet opulent image of a world that is ultimate yet worthy of living in. The perpetual development of content, which increasingly concentrates on motifs such as freedom, time, sensuality and value, is in this publication visible in Eitzenhöfer’s objects from the last ten years as well as in a selection from her earlier creative work.
Since 2005, Ute Eitzenhöfer (1969) is professor for gemstone design at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier (Germany), department Gemstone & Jewellery Design (campus Idar-Oberstein).
The university website writes about her work:
“The message of things
Ute Eitzenhöfer expresses herself, philosophically inspired and at a high intellectual level, with the phenomenon of jewellery as an artistic means of expression. Due to her intellectual approach she places the piece of jewellery in a conceptual context that goes far beyond the aspect of ‘adorning’, which examines the reality of the world and formulates its own messages. She specifically refers to Wittgenstein’s statement: ‘Everything we see, can also be otherwise.’
And she takes a clear position when she -as a kind of silent protest- saves the packaging waste at the end of social recovery process that is crashing from high quality promotional eye-catcher to valueless waste, from destruction, invoking its inherent poetic potential through artistic means and transforming it into a valuable piece of jewellery which is expression and confession of an attitude to the world at the same time for the artist as well as for the person who adorns herself with it.”
She combines worthless material with gemstones and precious and semi-precious stones.
The only glass used is the natural glass of obsidian. As a huge fan of her work, I can only recommend this interesting book with essays explaining that the anachronism between material value – which is zero- and the enormous amount of time lavished on the individual piece is what demonstrates how questionable our notions of value are (A Walk by Cornelie Holzach). Wilhelm Lindemann: A summon to think for yourself, jewellery – sky – questions; Marjan Unger: Elegant but also malicious, Michael Müller: Fourteen portraits followed by the Description of Objects, Biography, Author CVs and captions on the good photos.
Exhibition together with Iris Bodemer: Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, 9 Nov 2013 to 26 Jan 2014, afterwards at the Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus, Hanau and at the Coda Museum, Apeldoorn (NL).
See review on the book Iris Bodemer in Glass is more!
