During the Florence Jewellery Week, curated by Le Arti Orafe and held at several prestigious venues in the center of Florence from 28 April to 2 May, the Galleria del Palazzo Coveri hosted the exhibition of the PY winners, accompanied by a high-quality catalog.

FJW 2022 will be the first stop of a traveling exhibition, that will reach different places in the world:

The Netherlands, at Galerie Door,
from 13 November to 11 December 2022;
Barcelona, at Hannah Gallery by Klimt02,
from 11 January to 3 February 2023.

A selection of pieces was previewed at the Inhorgenta jewellery fair in Munich, during which one of the winners was awarded a free exhibition space for the next edition of the fair. Moreover, the winners competed for another great opportunity: a three-month stay as ‘artist in residence’ at the school’s laboratories to work on a new jewellery collection. Exceptionally, both awards were given this year to Charlotte Vanhoubroeck.

As every year since 2008, the requirements to win the competition are quality of design and making, experimental and contemporary use of materials, conceptual and technical innovation.

The selection, carried out in total transparency since the jurors do not know the participants’ names nor their country of origin or their education, makes Preziosa Young competition a reliable and internationally recognized event, which captures and promotes the spirit and the new issues of contemporary jewellery.

Winners

Xinia Guan

Xinia Guan’s work, as she states, is “rooted in process.”
Concentration and patience transform technical expertise into meditative practice. Her silver creations speak of a ‘slow time’, which allows her to delve into the geometry of shapes and patterns observed in nature. Rhythm, repetition, unity, and contrasts are the elements on which her goldsmith research is based, with the aim of giving material concreteness to the incessant flow of existence. The metal is sawn by hand, the dust diligently collected and converted into a new piece, metaphorically representing the hours spent at the goldsmith’s bench and declaring a certain sensitivity towards the problem of waste in the profession. Thus, laser welding, preferred to traditional welding, allows her to decide for a more environmentally sustainable technology.

Zhipeng Wang

The Chinese artist ZHIPENG WANG addresses the question of the identity in jewels, as objects that symbolize specific cultural traditions and as a declaration of belonging to a certain social class. The artist wonders how these values can survive today, in a globalized world where cultural singularities collide and mix together. These signet rings are made of tea and coffee, used as allegorical representatives of Eastern and Western cultures, respectively. Just as the typology of the signet – no longer synonymous with luxury and prestige – the ritual of these drinks also has its origins in the tradition of nobility, now absorbed into the ordinariness of everyday life.

Anne Lahn Hornbæk Hansen

Fascinated by the cloisonné enamel technique during an exchange experience at the Glasgow School Of Art in 2017, Danish artist ANNE LAHN HORNBÆK HANSEN decided to retrace the ancient process to translate into color her joyful illustrations that celebrate the female body in all its differences and imperfections. The criticism made in the series FEMME AND FAB is to the falsified world of filters, plasticized and glossy social media, that offers a single model to which young women end up referring to. These naked busts, to be worn as brooches, embody instead the most exuberant and proud spirit of the ‘body positive’ movement, proudly showing themselves hairy, flabby, decadent, and in all their precious and authentic variety.

Pilynn Siriphanich

The innovative material used by Thai PILYNN SIRIPHANICH is called ‘Agricultural Waste Composite’ and is the outcome of Onuma Wichaikul’s doctoral research, Jewellery: The Thread of Self-Sufficiency (2020), focused on the creation of an alternative and sustainable material to be used in jewelry making. That is a compound inspired by the transparency and lightness of the plastic bag, but made using natural fibers. It has involved a path punctuated with trial and error for the researcher. This series of failures – the leftovers – have become the main material of the collection, obeying the logic of upcycling, namely the creative recovery of waste. In doing so, the artist created jewels by folding the thin sheets into three-dimensional, light, and voluminous shapes.

Charlotte Vanhoubroeck

Charlotte Vanhoubroeck, art historian and goldsmith, as part of her PhD at the PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt, wanted to bring to light the character of Louise-Marie d’Orleans through the study of her inventory, which records the existence of more than a hundred jewels belonged to her. The Stilled Sentiments collection allows not only to retrace and reread an important female figure such as the first queen of Belgium, but also to reveal a whole emotional world of memories and secrets hidden behind these jewels, which contain miniature portraits, locks of hair, and engraved messages. Those pieces, reinterpreted and filtered by the sensitivity of the artist, give life to a collection that tells the spirit of a new time.