With jewellery and its proverbial imperishability as his starting point, Gisbert Stach, born in 1963, is a goldsmith and conceptual artist who experiments with transformation processes, with both evanescence and transvaluation.
In his works he re-interprets the Modernist revocation of the link between jewellery and precious materials in often startlingly quirky ways: rings are embedded in asphalt or dissolved in acid. By throwing knives at brooches during Performances he forges stunning showpieces. Stach’s breaded-veal-escalope brooches and his fishfinger brooches, which he makes look deceptively real by coating them with powdered amber, are jawdroppers, to say the least.
Stach puts a lot of love and humour into his works, which, however, are not merely superficially brilliant but, because the connection to the traditional uses of jewellery has been retained, transcend what is only seemingly a playful approach.
In twenty-five years of working gold and silver, Gisbert Stach has expanded the concept of jewellery by incorporating the media of photography, Performance and, not least, video: the moving-picture works that are also documented in this book are supplemented by QR codes to enable smartphone users to conveniently access the videos online. Thus Gisbert Stach has even extended the ways in which the book, a linear medium, can be handled.
