Exhibition
Sigurd Bronger or the mechanics of Absurdity
From November 5 to December 31, 2022, LA Joaillerie by Mazlo welcomes Sigurd Bronger for his first solo exhibition in France, in collaboration with the Robert Mazlo Endowment Fund for Art and contemporary Art Jewellery, the Alice Art Foundation and the Arketip Association.
The exhibition offers a glimpse into the Norwegian artist’s quirky universe through some twenty of his most recent or emblematic works.
Internationally recognized, winner in 2012 of the coveted Torsten and Wanja Söderbergs Design Award and soon to be honored by the Neue Sammlung in Munich for a retrospective that already promises to be the event of the 2024 edition of the Schmuck Woche, Sigurd Bronger remains largely unknown to the French public. The opportunities to see his work are actually quite rare : in Paris, the luckiest ones have been able to admire some of his works exhibited in 2013 by Norway, during the first edition of the Révélations fair of which the country was the guest of honor.
Yet, for more than thirty years, Sigurd Bronger has been standing as a maverick figurehead in the international experimental jewelry scene, for in him Homo Faber and Homo Ludens merge to create an original figure of jeweler-engineer. This designation fits this artist like a glove, since he has long abandoned the essentially ornamental function of jewellery. Since the end of the 90s, he has concentrated on the elaboration of objects based on the principle of the ready-made, which he names « wearable devices » and designs to stage all sorts of things. Some are drawn from the most prosaic everyday life - soap, eraser, used sole, sink drain -, while others - nautilus, eggs - have more to do with the Naturalia of the cabinets of curiosities. Anyway, all of them are conceived with a rigorous precision, the result of his classical training as a jeweler and clockmaker.
Nov 5 > Dec 31, 2022
Guest artist
Born in 1957 in Norway, Sigurd Bronger studied jewellery making at the Oslo vocational school between 1974 and 1975 before continuing his education in the Netherlands. He graduated from the MTS Vakschool in Schoonhoven in 1979 and undertook a three-year apprenticeship as an engraver at the Koninklijke Fabrieken Posthumus in Amsterdam. Since the mid-1980s, his work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions. His work is included in many prestigious private and public collections : in the United States, the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York and the Hellen Drutt-English Collection in Philadelphia ; the Craft Museum of China in Hangzhou, China ; the Neue Sammlung in Munich, Germany ; the Röhsska Design Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden ; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom ; the Danske Kunstindustrimuseum in Copenhagen, Denmark ; the Alice & Louis Koch Collection in Basle, Switzerland ; and the Bollman Collection in Vienna, Austria. In 2012, Sigurd Bronger received the Torsten & Wanja Söderbergs Design Award in Gothenburg, Sweden, the world's most important design award. Today he still lives and works in Oslo.
Selection of works
