September 11, 2020 - January 31, 2021

by Alba Cappellieri and Livia Tenuta

An exhibition dedicated to the excellencies of Vicenza and its province that have been able to transfer the principles of design to the jewellery world. Eight leading players who, through new visions and languages, have captured the spirit of time and made it tangible in jewels and designs that englobe ideas, truth and beauty.

Eight local-born designers on display at the Museo del Gioiello, Vicenza’s Jewellery Museum, located inside the Basilica Palladiana, the first in Italy and one of only a few in the world exclusively dedicated to jewellery, managed by Italian Exhibition Group S.p.A. (IEG) - in partnership with Vicenza Municipal Council. The exhibition “Designed in Vicenza”, curated by Alba Cappellieri and Livia Tenuta, presents a selection of jewellery items and products designed and created by Vicenza-based designers or design studios and will be open to the public from 11st September 2020.

Historically, jewellery has always been a middle ground between art, craftsmanship and design. Ambiguous objects with contrasting values, from unbridled luxury to conceptual state-of-the-art, from the dazzling preciousness of the materials to varying degrees of underlying design values. Art on the one hand, with the arrogance of its authorship, and fashion, with the fleetingness of the present, on the other, and, in the middle, jewellery with the defence of precious materials acting as bastions of eternity. While the value of a jewel has, for a very long time, been synonymous of preciousness, in other words, the physical cost of the material, nowadays this idea is decidedly outdated and now, the value of an item is the result of the quality of its design, of the designer’s ability to generate storytelling around the object through formal, material or technological choices and production techniques.

Thirty-five works – between jewellery and products – created by Atelier Crestani, Brogliato e Traverso, Aldo Cibic, Matteo Cibic, ivdesign, Cleto Munari, Reggiani Ceramica and Joe Velluto – tell the story of “good design” in an exhibition itinerary that aims to trace the aesthetic and experimental borders of the Vicenza territory.