Exploring the meaning of ornaments through various practices and perspectives, from architecture to the visual arts, after Pietro Consagra. Ornamenti (February–March 2024) and Andrea Branzi. Civilisations without jewels have never existed (December 2024 – January 2025), 10 Corso Como Gallery completes its trilogy of exhibitions dedicated to jewellery as a contemporary medium with a retrospective of the work of Swiss artist Bernhard Schobinger. The exhibition Bernhard Schobinger. Democracy of materials, staged in collaboration with galleria Martina Simeti, brings together sculptures and jewellery works from the second half of the 1970s up to the present day. The exhibition is split into thematic islands, associations and contrasts of curved and broken lines, following an idea of dynamic ‘’that evokes the travels of writer W. G. Sebald in his book The Rings of Saturn, which had a profound influence on the artist’ poetics.

The transformation of material – in its intrinsic power as raw material – from waste and remnants found as relics of a past era to crystals and precious stones, becomes the subject of meditation and manual concentration. The result is works that go beyond conventional exhibition means and become wearable. Schobinger’ production challenges our perspective, like a paradox or an enigma of koans, the phrases or stories that Zen Buddhist masters impart to their disciples. The exhibition recounts a search for absolute freedom both in terms of classic goldsmithing materials and the idea of formal coherence between construction and function: principles inherited from Swiss Concrete Art design and graphics, with its roots in modernism, which Schobinger transcends thanks to the punk influences of the second half of the 1970s.

The result is a process of democratisation of material that turns jewellery into the expression of a political idea and blurs the boundary with works of art. His is a poetics of deconstruction in which the tension that animates material is manifested through the use of fragments, twists and cuts: precious and radical works, fuelled by the intensity of a process that goes ‘ the grain’.

Bernhard Schobinger. Democracy of materials
Curated by Alessio de’ Navasques
10 Corso Como Gallery
12.12.2025 – 1.2.2026
Every day: 10.30am – 7.30pm
Free admission