The first of an outstanding private collection of contemporary jewellery has gone on show at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
The collection, built privately over 25 years, features works made during the past century including pieces by SA artists Sarah Rothe, Lauren Simeoni, Peta Kruger, Leslie Matthews, Julie Blyfield, Jane Bowden and Catherine Truman.
Flinders University Professor Joost Daalder and his wife Truus this year donated the 155 works of Australian and international jewellery, almost doubling the size of the gallery’s jewellery collection.
The Daalders were keen to keep the collection together as it has a strong representation of mainly female Australian jewellers, several of them highly regarded internationally, as well as a number of well-known artists from other countries.
“My wife and I have always been ‘jewellery addicts’ and this collection is very well known amongst those who love comtemporary jewellery,” Professor Daalder says.
“I see this donation to the Art Gallery of South Australia as our crowning achievement and as a service to the community.”
The gallery will display the entire collection of 155 pieces in a special “Daalder Contemporary Jewellery Collection” exhibition which will be on show for six months during 2018.
In keeping with the gallery’s emphasis on the “applied arts”, selected pieces from the collection will be shown on an ongoing and rotating basis.
A book, featuring all pieces from the collection, will be prepared by the AGSA to accompany the exhibition. Copies will be for sale during the exhibition and afterwards, and they can be purchased both by visitors to the AGSA and the general public.
The collection will be used as an ongoing source of reference and as an educational tool for lectures and workgroups of jewellers.
The gallery’s European and Australian Decorative Arts Curator Rebecca Evans describes the future exhibition as “transformative”.
“This is a very significant bequest that turns our holding of contemporary jewellery into one of the most sizeable and significant in Australia,” Ms Evans says.
The Daalders, who moved to Adelaide from New Zealand in 1976, decided to share their collection after more than 40 years in Australia.
They saw the Art Gallery donation as fitting well within the gallery’s new policy to emphasise contemporary art.