QUALITY - Legnica Jewellery Festival SILVER Collective
Legnica SILVER Festival is one of the largest events in Europe presenting contemporary artistic jewellery. The most important event of the Festival is the International Jewellery Competition which every year gathers several hundred works by artists from all over the world. The distribution of awards and the qualification of works for the exhibition is decided by an international jury consisting of renowned artists, professors, critics, experts and jewellery collectors. Each year the competition is held under a different title referring to important, universal problems and issues from the spheres of broadly understood art, culture, sociology or media.
The theme of the current edition of the Competition is QUALITY. What is quality nowadays? Is the growing awareness of consumers based - as it used to be - on an assessment of craftsmanship and the market value of bullion? Or is it drifting towards a concern for the welfare of the planet, a broader reflection on the maker's intentions and the relationship with the client? The material of goldsmithing is increasingly becoming the idea itself, which takes the shape of objects with a variety of styles that enter into a dialogue with the viewer. If the artist's message becomes more important than the formal aspects of jewellery, what is the ideological background? Are there, therefore, specific material manifestations and aesthetic determinants that define the quality of an artistic statement?