Exhibition "Daniel Brush Cuffs and Necks" (Paris)

Brush’s creations demonstrate solitary thought, study and experimentation, resulting in a deeply expressive and intellectual force. From one of a kind wearable jewels to large scale drawings and sculptures, Brush’s work goes beyond traditional art categories, and demonstrates astonishing intricacy amidst a timeless aesthetic.

An assortment of collars from NECKS, a jeweler’s poetry book documenting 117 colliers de chien made for the book, are to be exhibited alongside a series of cuffs, all featuring unique combinations of steel, diamonds and other precious stones. Daniel Brush makes all his work with his own hands.

The CUFFS AND NECKS exhibition welcomes the public to discover the creations of this rare artist. Historian and former university professor, lover of fairy tales, painter and poet, artisan, sculptor and jeweler Daniel Brush is an inspired man who is set apart by his technical mastery, his eclectic spirit and his timeless aesthetic.

One is irresistibly drawn in and fascinated by his incredible virtuosity and the delicacy of his work in engraving and carving steel and gold, his absolutely perfect mastery of granulation, his way of setting the most minuscule stones in the hardest steel… Paintings, sculptures, jewels: his multidisciplinary oeuvre stepping out of time, innovative and yet also traditional, defies any established categorization, captures and enchants us.

Daniel Brush, revered American artist-goldsmith, painter, sculptor, philosopher, engineer and enigma is not so much a Renaissance man as a modern-day alchemist. Secluded in his Manhattan loft, with his wife and soul-mate, Olivia, also an artist, as his constant companion and collaborator, secreted in a labyrinth of the myriad antique turning lathes, and guilloche-engraving machines that he collects, Brush practises the ancient, noble art of the goldsmith, fusing art and science, with poetry and philosophy.

Daniel Brush can – and surely will through this exhibition at L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts, – transform all our perceptions and dispel our preconceptions of jewellery, challenging us to re-think our understanding of the jewel, its role, decorative, emotional or talismanic, its place in our lives today, its relationship to the body, to femininity, to fashion and fabrics. Perhaps most thought-provoking of all, through his work Brush questions the very meaning – or as he terms it the “total construct” - of preciousness and value. For Daniel Brush, these cosmic questions, and many more, are a vital part of his own daily challenge. He wrestles with them, and seeks out, invites confusion, as it is in the midst of confusion, he explains, that he finds his “big ideas”, his next conceptual or technical obsession. It has been this way for some 40 years.