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David Bielander

Awarded

David Bielander

Verschiedene Schmuckarbeiten

Products and objects

Jury report

Decorative Things
David Bielander's cre­ations are in­spired by the every­day world, by things that have stayed with him or that come from the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of our so­ci­ety. Once the ob­ject is placed on a per­son, it re­veals its po­ten­tial as a per­sonal jew­ellery item.
This kind of am­bi­gu­ity is an in­te­gral part of all his de­signs. In 2002, after train­ing as a gold­smith in Basel, he com­pleted his mas­ter's de­gree at the Akademie der Bilden­den Künste in Mu­nich under Otto Künzli. The in­flu­ence of his teacher can read­ily be recog­nised - a rounded, many-faceted ed­u­ca­tion ex­pressed in a sure knowl­edge of ma­te­ri­als and in skilled crafts­man­ship. His cre­ations are dis­tinct, to a cer­tain de­gree, from tra­di­tional dec­o­ra­tive art. They re­tain their func­tion as or­na­ments, but the down­right banal char­ac­ter of these every­day shapes is star­tling. A sil­ver slug to be worn as a brooch? A bracelet shaped like a tyre? A neck­lace of wooden weis­s­wurst?
The last of these ob­jects is a good ex­am­ple of the way David Bielander works. The sausage el­e­ments are based on the arm­rests of Thonet's No. 14 Chair - not be­cause the artist's in­ten­tion is to cre­ate an homage to a clas­sic de­sign or be­cause he hap­pens to like the chair, but be­cause the arm­rests pos­sess pre­cisely the cor­rect shape and cur­va­ture. Bielander adds that the sausages were in fact al­ways pre­sent in the chair, and that what he has done is to ‘lib­er­ate' them!
For the ‘Mistkäfer' (dung bee­tle) he again makes use of an ex­ist­ing shape: a steel tea­spoon. In this case, noth­ing was cut away; in­stead, the whole spoon was trans­formed into a per­fect dung bee­tle, com­plete with legs, wings and a pro­boscis, by cut­ting into and bend­ing its metal. This is a process that we as­so­ci­ate with magic tricks - but David Bielander per­forms it to per­fec­tion.
Where David Bielander is in­volved, noth­ing is as it seems. The artist free-as­so­ci­ates ob­jects, forms, colours and every­day scenes. He si­mul­ta­ne­ously main­tains ab­strac­tion and suf­fi­cient sim­plic­ity, leav­ing us free to make our own in­ter­pre­ta­tion. His dec­o­ra­tive items, how­ever, are al­ways made to be worn, and to be be­com­ing to the wearer.

Biography

David Bielander
Born in
1968
Education
Jewellery Designer

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