The Artistry of the Gallerist

A virtual conversation between 4 female gallerists and Caroline Palmer for New York City Jewelry Week 2025

Cover image: Tanel Veenre, Gloomy Bride’s Kiss II, brooch, 2024, reconstructed onyx and silver

Galleries are an important part of the contemporary jewelry world. They offer a space for new talent as well as established designers and artists. They build relationships with collectors, museums and the jewelry-buying public to promote and sell their work. Leading gallerists Esther de Beaucé, Elisabetta Cipriani, Sienna Patti and Yael Reisner reveal their own unique approach in a panel discussion hosted by journalist Caroline Palmer.

Participants:

Esther de Beaucé

Esther de Beaucéounded Galerie MiniMasterpiece in Paris, France in 2012. It is the only gallery in Paris exclusively dedicated to art jewelry. She has collaborated with over 50 acclaimed contemporary artists, including Joana Vasconcelos, Phillip King, Andres Serrano, Lee Ufan, Wang Keping, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, Jean-Luc Moulène, and Pablo Reinoso. Esther initiates the projects, exhibits and sells the jewels through her gallery (45 shows so far) and in art / design fairs. This fall, she will be lending a dozen jewels from nine women artists to the Cologne Museum of Applied Arts, for its exhibition dedicated to jewelry by female visual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As part of her obsession to raise the profile of art jewelry, she also lends earrings four nights a week to the French TV journalist, Elisabeth Quin, for her primetime show.

Elisabetta Cipriani

Elisabetta Cipriani invites world leading contemporary artists to create aesthetically innovative and socially relevant wearable art projects. Since the opening of her namesake gallery in London in 2009, she has collaborated with over 50 painters and sculptors, including Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Giulio Paolini, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Enrico Castellani, Erwin Wurm, Giorgio Vigna, Jannis Kounellis, Rebecca Horn, and Michele Oka Doner.

Sienna Patti

Sienna Patti founded her gallery Sienna Patti Contemporary in 1998 to work with emerging and established contemporary artists to create art-jewelry with a focus on the innovative use of material and mediums. The gallery presents many group and solo exhibitions each year and exhibits at some of the leading art and design fairs worldwide. The work of Sienna Patti Contemporary artists are found in the collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; The Louvre, Paris.

Yael Reisner

In 2023 architect Yael Reisner switched from research-based architectural practice and curatorial work to found the Objects Beautiful gallery, in London, focusing on the pursuit of beauty, campaigning for a concept emptied of meaning in the creative world through the 20th century. She has exhibited internationally at major fairs and initiated pop-ups. For the 2025 Collect show in London, she commissioned 35 artist-jewelers to create jewelry for hair. The gallery includes art-jewelry and art-clothing, alongside paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photography and architectural material. Objects Beautiful artists’ work is found in many museums including the V&A in London, MoMA San Francisco, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, South Korea.

Caroline Palmer

Caroline Palmer is a freelance journalist based in London who writes about jewelry and related subjects for the Financial Times and other publications. She is a former features editor of Design magazine, which was published by the UK Design Council. She recently completed a diploma in jewellery design and making at the K2 Academy of Contemporary Jewellery in London.

---

As part of the conversation, Yael gave a presentation outlining the gallery’s vision as well as highlighting the work of selected artists. See a transcript of this below:

My curation focuses on the pursuit of beauty. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a common phrase in Western culture, which means that beauty is subjective. This is true, yet, when an object is exquisitely beautiful, most people agree that it is beautiful… So not so subjective after all. We cannot define beauty in simple terms, however what we see as beautiful is often immediately known to us. The neuroscientist Semir Zeki discovered in 2011, that where we define beauty in our brain is triggered by art or nature. When we see what we feel is beautiful – activity in the pleasure centre of the emotional brain increases immediately, and its intensity is measurable. Neuroscientists found that daily pleasure of beauty is a serious matter of health. Humans could not exist without experiencing beauty daily and often…

Michael Becker’s work bridges the gap between the arts and craft, historically separated as two different territories, where artists were expected to be able to think conceptually, and artisans were expected to excel with traditional skills. But now the borders are blurred. We can see here why Beckers’ skills are the envy of many; his details are unbelievably exquisite. This necklace is so pleasant to wear, as it has a soft movement and lightness. He is the master of moving parts in his necklaces and bracelets.

These days, art jewellery utilises numerous alternative materials, not only gold, silver and diamonds as days gone by. Hea Lim Shin’s brooch won a Loewe award for crafts, where she painted rain on canvas, and then manipulated it to create a new beautiful expression held together by silver. Her artistic themes revolve around rain drops and the moon. As you can see here, these hair-pins, created especially for Objects Beautiful, were shown as part of the Rocks & Locks showcase – a hair jewellery project, exhibited at Collect in London, and Schmuck in Munich in 2025.

Heejoo Kim, UniverShell, 2023, necklace, enamelled copper, silver

Heejoo Kim, from Seoul, uses a process called electroforming, where metal is layered on an object she has carved out of wax. After this she adds colour. Whereas Ketli Tiistar, from Tallinn, works with wood she finds in her family’s garden, infusing her works with memories.

Katli Tiitsar, Side by Side 4, 2025, brooch, thuja and plum wood, paint, silver and stainless steel

The necklace and the brooch, are by Tanel Veenre from Tallinn, made of ebony, onyx, and silver. Carina Shoshtary’s hair-comb, titled ‘Grief’, purchased by the Auckland Museum, NZ in 2025 (including her other hair-comb titled ‘Hope’), is an incredibly loaded expression about the artist’s grief. She executes her designs through her skills of using bio plastics and PLA, by using a 3D pen to paint her objects three dimensionally. Here it’s mostly in black, though she is known for her wide colour palette. Beauty was taboo in the arts through the 20th C. And it was thanks to the field of mathematicians for physics, as Einstein, who were part of the only discipline that never stopped believing in the importance of beauty, that we have a clear and decisive list of characteristics and qualities of beauty, that includes :  Elegance, Profundity, Originality, Clarity, Seriousness, Significance, Economy, Magic, Ambiguity, wrapped in Enigma.

Nurit David, Giant Heads Coat, art to wear, 100% Polyester, acrylic backing, lining: duchess Satin, 100% Polyester

I also enjoy commissioning painting, architectural material, and photography, however, walking in beauty through art-to-wear is the core of my mission. So far, I have worked with 44 art-jewellers based in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and NZ. We see here art-textiles by the painter Nurit David, who has an incredible sense of colour and form. This original coat, and other pieces by her, were exhibited at Collect 2025 alongside our art-jewellery…. Thank you!

Watch on YouTube from 37 minutes to hear Yael’s presentation.