The present lot is from Lisa Gralnick’s Black Acrylic Series (1986–1991), a body of works that would be the subject of her first major gallery exhibitions in Washington D.C., New York and Amsterdam. Gralnick discusses her use of black acrylic with Mija Reidel for the Archives of American Art, listing her encounter with a black rubber house in upstate New York, a black submarine in the harbor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a broken record as inspiring her creative direction. With myriad influences—architecture, geometry, sculpture, technology, to name only a few—and through the exploration of a non-precious material, Gralnick was free to explore form without restraint and the resulting works a distinct vernacular in wearable art.
Jewelry from Gralnick's Black Acrylic Series can be found in several museum collections including the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
“… it felt absolutely liberating to have, kind of, found this anonymous material that I could work, and that no longer had any of the associations of the preciousness of the gold and the silver and the enamel.”
Lisa Gralnick, Archives of American Art
Lisa Gralnick b. 1956
Lisa Gralnick’s sublime and stark jewelry invokes a tension between thinking and sensing. The intellectual, mathematical and philosophical concerns of her work are grounded in a mastery of traditional goldsmith techniques, creating jewelry that, in Gralnick’s words, “refuses to behave.” Her acrylic works, severe and matte-black, stand as inert relics, relating the wearer to the broader arc of the history of industry and objects, while her exquisite works in gold are rigorous and poetic.
Gralnick was born in New York in 1956 and studied metalsmithing at SUNY, New Paltz, graduating with a masters in 1980. She moved to New York City in 1982 to pursue designing jewelry full-time and in 1991 she became the head of the jewelry and metals department at Parsons School of Design. Her breakthrough works were part of the Black Acrylic collection, beginning in 1986, which was inspired by both the materiality of what she was working with, as well as the mood in the artistic community and culture at large in the era. This collection was also part of the larger arc in contemporary jewelry of artists moving away from traditional notions of value, aesthetics and materials. In the 1990s she began working with metals, using machines, mechanical structures, mathematics and physics as a jumping-off point for complex, intellectual works. In 2002, she began an eight-year project, The Gold Standard, which comprised investigations into both the cultural and material value and meaning of gold.
In 2001 she relocated to Madison, Wisconsin to teach at the University of Wisconsin. Her works are held in such prestigious collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In recent years, Gralnick's work has taken on increasingly conceptual and sculptural modes of expression, while still incorporating her meticulous and exquisite craftsmanship.
