Ted Noten solo exhibition at Ornamentum Gallery

Sat, Jul 22 - Sun, Aug 13  2023

Ornamentum Gallery

During Upstate Art Weekend 2023 , Ornamentum Gallery in Hudson, NY, will open a solo exhibition by renowned Dutch artist and jewelry designer Ted Noten. Opening + artist reception: Saturday, July 22, 2023, 4:00-6:00 PM. Read more here.

In the new solo exhibition, Ted Noten: Incubators, the Dutch artist continues the exploration of visual and conceptual language that has defined his career.

Noten has never considered there to be a separation between the fields of fine art and conceptual jewelry; he considers both as, essentially, content and language. Internationally recognized for his playful and unconventional influence on the field of contemporary jewelry, the artist uses this medium as a devious tool. It is a means to seduce his audience, drawing them in until its provocative message is unavoidable. Noten attacks convention, using jewelry as his weapon.

Ted Noten: Incubators includes twelve necklaces from the artist’s new body of work. Each is inspired by individuals, historical and also fictional, whom Noten considers ‘incubators’: 7 Angels, Bach, Calamity Jane, Charles Bukowski, Leonardo da Vinci, For Whom I Love, Friedrich Nietsche, Gandhi, Jack Kerouac, Onno Boekhoudt & Otto Künzli, Sigmund Freud, and Spock. There will be twenty-seven works in total when the series is complete. These are tributes to his ‘icons’, made in much the same way as the Romans would recognize people of influence by adorning them in wreaths. Many of these names are notable and some might be considered objectionable. “Would it be an honest discourse without one or two insults?” Noten asks. “I, and the rest of humanity, unfortunately, have been tainted by disturbing histories and lasting prejudices.”

Incubators arose from a request for a retrospective, after which Noten chose instead to create a new body of work. The working series is a portrait of the artist, but rather than attempting to find the essence of ‘self’, it brings attention to the figures who have had a lasting and irreplaceable influence in his life. These include a range of people and experiences—a smiling old lady he passed on the street, a flagrant pop song screamed in the bedroom with the stereo turned all the way up and the door locked, the first person of color he saw on the podium—moments both big and small that shape identity. Driven by intuition, Noten’s creative process allows feelings to take precedence over aesthetics. Incubators reflects on how as time passes and our awareness matures, and that we can only move forward if we understand the past.

In addition to these new works, Ted Noten: Incubators also features several iconic Ted Noten acrylic works, including two bag sculptures, one necklace, five small pendants and two pairs of earrings.

About Ted Noten

Ted Noten is a jewelry designer who lives and works in the Netherlands. His work acts as a critique on contemporary life and on the history of jewelry, as well as on the wider context of product design. The underlying, recurring, theme of his work is to challenge convention and processes of habituation, the familiar and the unusual. Noten is represented in a range of international galleries, museums and private collections, including ARCO (PT), F.N.A.C. (FR), Hiko Mizuno Jewellery College (JP), LACMA (US), Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (US), Metropolitan Museum of Art (US), National Museum of Arts, Architecture and Design (NO), Neue Sammlung-Design Museum (DE), The Stedelijk Museum (NL), and Victoria and Albert Museum (UK). He exhibits regularly and is slated for a 2024 solo exhibition at Museum Jan (NL) and a major overview exhibition at the Arnhem Museum of Art (NL) in 2025.

About Ornamentum Gallery

Founded in 2002, Ornamentum Gallery exhibits a dynamic collection of contemporary jewelry as well as related objects and artworks. Ornamentum hosts numerous exhibitions yearly in their Hudson, NY exhibition space – one of the world’s largest gallery spaces dedicated specifically to contemporary jewelry – where featured designers display their work in conceptual installations. Ornamentum is recognized as the first gallery of its kind to introduce the medium of contemporary conceptual jewelry to the worldwide design market, exhibiting at Design Miami since 2008, and in Basel, Switzerland from 2011 – 2018, in addition to numerous other prestigious design fairs in NYC and California.