Postmodern jewellery is the studio and gallery jewellery movement spanning approximately 1970 to 1995, characterised by irony and narrative content, the deliberate rejection of Modernist material purity, the use of mixed and non-precious materials alongside precious metals, and a sustained engagement with conceptual content that situated jewellery within the broader contemporary-art conversation. The movement built directly on the foundations laid by Pop Art jewellery in the 1960s while moving beyond Pop's mass-culture preoccupations into more individualised, often sceptical and political, conceptual territory. The work is preserved in major decorative-arts and contemporary-art collections including the SchmuckMuseum Pforzheim, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the V&A, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

The break from Modernism

Mid-twentieth-century studio jewellery had been organised around Modernist principles inherited from Bauhaus and Scandinavian design: truth to materials, formal abstraction, the integrity of process, and an aesthetic restraint that aligned with broader Modernist architecture and product design. The Modernist studio jewellery of the 1950s and 1960s — represented by makers including Margaret De Patta in the United States, Sigurd Persson in Sweden, and Friedrich Becker in Germany — produced sophisticated abstract work in precious metals that read as continuous with the broader Modernist project.

Postmodern jewellery rejected that frame on multiple axes. Material hierarchy was abandoned: gold and silver appeared alongside plastic, found objects, photographs, paper, and industrial materials, with no claim that the precious materials were inherently more serious than the non-precious. Narrative content, often ironic or political, displaced formal abstraction as the primary register of meaning. The boundary between jewellery and wearable sculpture was deliberately blurred, with pieces sized and configured for the gallery wall as much as for the body.

Key figures and works

Otto Künzli, working in Munich from the late 1970s onward, produced some of the movement's defining work, including the Gold Makes You Blind series (rubber bracelets containing concealed gold balls) and the Wallpaper brooches (printed-paper images mounted on the body as transient ornament). Künzli's argument was that jewellery's value rests in the social and conceptual rather than the material, and his work systematically undermined the assumption that gold and stones constitute the necessary substrate of jewellery.

Gijs Bakker and Emmy van Leersum in the Netherlands extended their 1960s acrylic work into more conceptually framed practice through the 1970s and 1980s, producing pieces that engaged the body as architectural surface rather than as ornament site. The Dutch movement broadly, including the work of Robert Smit and Onno Boekhoudt, contributed substantially to the international postmodern conversation.

British practitioners including Wendy Ramshaw, David Watkins, Pierre Degen, and Caroline Broadhead produced parallel work, often sited at the boundary of jewellery and performance. The British movement was institutionally supported by the Royal College of Art and by exhibitions at the Crafts Council and the Goldsmiths' Hall.

Materials and techniques

The postmodern material vocabulary was deliberately catholic: precious metals, found objects, polymers, rubber, paper, photographic transfer, fabric, and industrial components all appeared in the work, often in combinations that emphasised material contrast. Construction techniques borrowed from contemporary art, industrial design, and craft traditions outside jewellery, with assemblage, photo-transfer, casting in non-traditional materials, and digital fabrication entering the vocabulary as the period progressed.

The work was often produced in series rather than as one-off pieces, with conceptual or thematic series organising the practice across multiple individual objects. Editioning practices borrowed from contemporary printmaking entered the field, and some makers produced pieces in numbered editions with documentation comparable to that of fine-art prints.

Institutional and market context

Postmodern jewellery was supported through a network of specialised galleries (Galerie Marzee in Nijmegen, Galerie Ra in Amsterdam, Velvet da Vinci in San Francisco, the Ornamentum Gallery in Hudson, New York), through art-school programmes (the Munich Akademie under Hermann Jünger and later Künzli, the RCA in London, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam), and through international biennial and triennial exhibitions including the Schmuck show held annually in Munich.

The work entered museum collections in significant volume during the 1980s and 1990s, with the SchmuckMuseum Pforzheim, the Stedelijk Amsterdam, MAD New York, and the V&A all building substantial holdings. The market for the work has remained primarily institutional and serious-collector, with secondary-market trade through specialist dealers and auction-house design departments rather than through conventional jewellery channels.

Influence and legacy

Postmodern jewellery established the conceptual and material frame within which contemporary art jewellery has continued to develop. The use of non-precious materials, the engagement with narrative and political content, the editioning of work, and the integration of jewellery into the broader contemporary-art exhibition and collecting infrastructure are all postmodern legacies that the contemporary movement has inherited and extended. The strict separation between art jewellery and commercial fine jewellery, established during the postmodern period, persists in the contemporary market.

In the trade

Postmodern jewellery trades in the contemporary art jewellery market, with named-maker provenance, edition number where applicable, and exhibition history as the primary value drivers. Pricing for blue-chip postmodern work — Künzli, Bakker, Ramshaw, Watkins, Broadhead — has appreciated meaningfully over the past two decades, with major pieces reaching five-figure and occasionally six-figure prices at specialist auction. For dealers, evaluating postmodern work requires familiarity with the makers, the period gallery and exhibition infrastructure, and the editioning conventions specific to the field.

Further reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — twentieth-century jewellery articles
• International Gem Society — contemporary jewellery reference
• ICA — contemporary jewellery context