On December 12th the Grassi Museum for Applied Art in Leipzig, Germany will open an exhibit of over 250 works of Daniel Kruger. This comprehensive exhibit will include the Kruger’s jewelry and ceramics from the past 40 years.
Experimental, unconventional and individual: an irrepressible curiosity and boundless creativity in dealing with materials, forms and techniques are all hallmarks of the work by artist Daniel Kruger.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition is a publication, Between Nature and Artifice (Arnoldsche, 2014) that documents the contemporaneity of the diverse possibilities of his expression and opens up a pictorial world of aesthetic pleasure.
Very rarely does a jewelry artist manage to find new pictorial worlds of such a personal nature during the course of their creative work so freely and unencumbered as Daniel Kruger (born 1951, South Africa). His experiments with the most diverse materials, decoration, forms and structures testify to an exuberant creativity for which he was honored with the renowned Herbert Hofmann Award for Art Jewellery in 1987 and 2005. Daniel Kruger uses found objects of every kind and quotes historical forms and decoration. The unusual combinations of materials as well as new interpretations of techniques used in handcraft and textile work lend his jewellery pieces ever surprising new perspectives and aesthetic pleasure as well as a decidedly erotic quality, as he himself puts it.The works from the last forty years presented in this exhibition not only illustrate Daniel Kruger’s curiosity with unconventional techniques and materials; they are also an expression of his awareness of nature and artificiality, history and tales, tradition and present: sometimes ironic, at times restrained, but frequently also opulent and sensual.
