Exhibition: Daniel Brush, The Art of Line and Light
As a child, upon seeing an Etruscan bowl studded with tiny gold beads at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Daniel Brush (1947-2022) vowed to one day unlock its secret. The ancient art of granulation never left him.
Initially trained as a painter and a professor of art philosophy at Georgetown, this American abandoned everything to relocate to New York in 1978. He became a goldsmith, jeweler, engraver and gem-setter without any formal training, learning the craft solely through his own hands. It was in his Manhattan loft, alongside his wife Olivia, that he spent decades working with gold, steel, aluminum, and bakelite as a painter would his canvas. These materials became surfaces for him to sculpt and engrave, and it was from this often industrial matter that he drew light. Line and light, indeed, are the themes of the retrospective that The School of Jewelry Arts in Paris is dedicating to him until October 4th, his first major monograph since his passing. /public-objects/d4334b83-3f61-4a69-b8ee-bdf5ba5ccebd-2ac19f54-285c-4d91-b259-ed9174386444-Daniel_BrushOrb_Sphere_1992-1995Or_pur_acierCollection_privee_copie.webp Image sélectionnée /public-objects/a4544876-ca95-42ba-a28b-08e7f5b3fed7-f1f8009f-4415-42a2-8bc4-80d058b369dc-Daniel_BrushNest_Nid_Papillons_Coccinelles_1990_-_1992Or_pur_acierCollection_privee_copie.webp Image sélectionnée Curated by Olivia Brush, his wife, and jewelry historian Vivienne Becker, the exhibition brings together over 75 pieces (jewelry, sculptures, paintings), some of which are leaving his New York workshop for the first time. Neither chronological nor thematic, it embraces the artist's obsessions and the questions that haunted him: should jewelry be worn? Can it be held in hand, contemplated, elevated to the status of a work of art? One piece perfectly encapsulates his answer. The "Loose Threads", 176 steel twists enhanced with diamonds, were inspired by the silk threads that clung to Olivia's clothes in the evening as she left the workshop. All unique, they are conceived not as jewelry but as a single work of art: the element of childhood and play that balanced the gravity of his thought. Daniel Brush's creations are now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Victoria & Albert Museum—the very place where, in front of a few gold beads, it all began.