Otto Künzli has recently been awarded the Swiss Confederation’s Grand Prix Design 

2010.1 We can trace the roots of the social and political commentary so characteristic of 
his work to transformations in European society brought in by economic development 
in   the   second   half   of   the   twentieth   century.2  In   post­war   Europe   social   changes 
influenced art education and transformed the perspective of goldsmiths who trained 
at art school – which became a fertile ground for the cross­pollination of applied and 
fine   arts.   Jewellery   departments   encouraged   self­expression   and   individuality,   an 
objective more often pursued by fine artists. Instead of simply copying and adapting 
the formal models from the past, applied art students were encouraged to delve into 
new materials and concepts, reflecting their own time. The role of the goldsmith as 
simply an executor of a designer’s idea began to change. 

Otto Künzli (b. Switzerland 1948) trained as a goldsmith in Munich under Hermann 
Jünger   (b.   Germany   1928)   in   the   1970s,   a   time   when   the   traditional   view   of   the 
goldsmith – as mainly a very skilled technician – was still being challenged. More 
importantly,   the   preceding   decade   was   a   time   of   social   unrest,   manifest   in   the 
counterculture movement. Anti­establishment radical artists used new media, such as 
performance and body art, to react against an apparent apathy in the art world. 3 Art 
became   politicised   again   and   it   carried   a   message.   In   parallel   with   this,   jewellers 
started   questioning   their   own   field   of   practice.   Künzli   is   part   of   a   generation   of 
European jewellers, including Gijs Bakker (b. Holland 1942), Caroline Broadhead (b. 
England   1950)   and   Bernhard   Schobinger   (b.   Switzerland   1946),   who   felt 
uncomfortable with the conventions that surrounded jewellery making and wearing 
and its long held connotations of luxury and wealth. They started using non­precious 
materials to reject elitist values and connotations. They also began to use photography 
and performance as part of their practice and to produce multiples. This could be seen 
as a response to a desire of democratizing the work and a reflection of the discomfort 
that   some   of   them   had   about   using   precious   materials,   especially   gold.   This 
generation   of   jewellers   sought   to   create   work   that   challenged   assumed   notions   of 
preciousness and wearability; exploring the history and tradition of the field critically 
in order to contest it.

Although Otto Künzli’s work reflects a wide range of concerns within and outside the 
arena of jewellery,4  it is the exploration of jewellery’s history and the materiality of 

gold that inform the work shown here. 
Otto Künzli. Gold makes you blind, 1980. Rubber, gold.

Künzli   declared   that   gold   had   lost   its   appeal   to   him   in   part   due   to   the   arbitrary 
production of meaningless gold jewellery. What once had been “a reflection of the 
divine” and was imbued with mythical lure  had become  empty and unappealing. 

Perhaps this could also have been due to social and political circumstances, such as 
the   extraction   of   gold   in   South   Africa   during   the   Apartheid   regime.   In   1980   he 
decided to make his “final work with gold”, a black rubber bangle encasing a ball of 
gold – Gold makes you blind. This, for him, was a way of returning gold to the darkness 
from whence it came and allowing him to “reappraise gold”.5 

Otto Künzli. Chain, 1985­1986. Gold. L: 85 cm. 

When   Künzli   returned   to   using   gold,   he   explored   the   narrative   potential   of   an 
archetypal   jewellery   piece   embedded   in   ritual:   the   wedding   ring.   The   result   was 
loaded with moral issues, for Chain is constructed from 48 second­hand gold wedding 
rings.6  Although   it   is   ‘classical’   and   aesthetically  pleasing,   it   was,   in   the   words   of 
jewellery critic and author Ralph Turner, “unwearable”:7 who would want to wear a 
chain composed of rings that were once part of other people’s lives, some of them 
with   personal   engravings?   Wedding   rings   are   charged   with   cultural   connotations. 
They are very intimate pieces of jewellery and one would like to imagine that they 
would be cherished even after the death of its owner, or maybe have been buried with 
them. To see that, in the end, most of them are recycled, melted down to produce yet 
more jewellery is to have the romantic notion of a precious personal object destroyed. 
In   the   catalogue   of   Künzli’s  The   Third   Eye  exhibition   the   following   question   was 
posed: “How much gold from antiquity, from the Aztecs, from marvellous cult objects 
and art works lives on in some ordinary piece of jewelry today, or how much from the 
teeth   of   Nazi   victims   in   concentration   camps…?”.8  Chain  makes   us   reflect   on   the 
fundamentally   transient   nature   of   life   and   relationships,   on   the   transformation   of 
matter and jewellery’s place in all of this.
Notes
1

This text is intended as a brief introduction to the work of Otto Künzli in response to NOVAJOIA’s
post of his latest award, and is not a thematic essay.
2

For a discussion of these changes, see Ursula Ilse-Neuman, ‘None that Glitters: Perspectives on
Dutch and British Jewelry in the Donna Schneier Collection’, in Zero Karat: The Donna Schneier Gift
to the American Craft Museum. New York: American Craft Museum, 2002.
3

Piero Manzoni (1933-63), one of the fathers of Conceptual Art, created a limited edition of cans
containing the artist’s shit, in 1961, to comment on the “cult of personality in the Western art
market”. See Robert Hughes. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1980, p. 382.
4

Künzli has produced multiples (The Red Spot and Colour brooches), used alternative materials
(e.g. hardfoam, wallpaper), made political, social and cultural comments (Oh, say exhibition
focusing on U.S.A. society and its icons; Gold makes you blind and Chain) and used performance
and photography to support and articulate the ideas behind his jewellery (Swiss Gold – The
Deutschmark).

5
See Liesbeth Crommelin and Otto Künzli. Otto Künzli: The Third Eye. Amsterdam: Stedelijk
Museum, 1991, p. 20.

6
The wedding rings were obtained through a newspaper advertisement.
7

See Peter Dormer and Ralph Turner. The New Jewellery: trends + traditions. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1994.
8

Otto Künzli: The Third Eye, p. 92.