Winfried Krueger

Winfried Krüger (born 1944) belongs to that generation of jewelry artists who witnessed the birth of avant-garde jewelry in the 1960s. The skilled goldsmith liberated himself from precision, fineness and other virtues of his craft in order to allow free rein to his creativity. For Krüger, jewelry is ever-present. From the tread of a shoe via the launch pad of a firework to the set of a science fiction film – he finds inspiration in all of these things. Translated into metal, extraordinary artworks are then created, which in the examination of ideas, form, materiality and surface show a modern, innovative understanding of jewelry, which he has imparted to his students over twenty years as lecturer at the technical college for design in Pforzheim. Despite this, Winfried Krüger has, as far as publishing his work is concerned, played hard to get. For the very first time this monograph presents the artist’s work in a comprehensive retrospective, whose focus rests on the work from the last twenty years. Winfried Krüger is represented in numerous prestigious museums and collections, including Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim (DE), Designmuseo, Helsinki (FI), Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (DE), Stedelijk Museum’s-Hertogenbosch (NL), Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal (CAN), Die Neue Sammlung – The International Design Museum Munich (DE), Galerie Marzee, Nijmegen (NL), Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains, Lausanne (CH). Text in English and German.