Beppe Kessler (1952, Amsterdam) is a contemporary painter and jewellery maker and who lives and works in the Netherlands. Kessler graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1979, with a degree in textile art and industrial textile design.

‘My inspiration lies in huge concepts you cannot describe into words. Like time, nothingness, the violence of the elements. Or in small things I encounter, thoughts that amaze me, making me realize that vulnerability gives life to things’.

recent work

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Article ‘Art Jewelry Quo Vadis?’- Art Aurea

About Dutch Masters

I call a series of brooches Dutch Masters, inspired by the idea that the image we have of a cow has been tilted. 
All those idyllic landscape paintings from the 17th century and later show romantic scenes of cows and other cattle: it meant abundance, wealth, the land of milk and butter… after all, agriculture was circular back then.
Now the cow is seen as the culprit with its manure emissions and the associated nitrogen problem.
An image of a cow is placed on the NOS to visualize the nitrogen problem…
While we ourselves have turned the cow into a machine!

The brooches are about then and now.
The starting point is a Dutch master, a painting by a Dutch master from the 17th century or later. For example, I worked with Willem Maris (Rijksmuseum), Adriaen van de Velde (Louvre), Nicolaes Berchem, (private collection UK), Vincent van Gogh (Musee d’Art Moderne, Lille) and Jan Voerman (private collection NL) 
I cover a photo of the painting with a piece of convex or concave acrylic, which works like a magnifying glass (or in the case of Maris as a reduction). The painting becomes a shiny gemstone. The image is somewhat concealed, so that the viewer has to do his best to recognize it as an old master.

Around this I compose elements that together tell the above story.
I respond to the painting with an abstract painting on aluminum. 
Or I add a piece of cow leather. 
Or I use a recent photo of grassland as a counterpart, again ‘set’ in acrylic.
A third element is tactile: gold-embroidered balsa wood or a piece of amber.
I hope to make the viewer think.

for ever

What if you suddenly hear that you are ill…
What do you do afterwards, when you are totally ok again, what do you want to say and make, how to start?
Come back.

What do you do with all those half things that lie in drawers, stored in boxes: damaged, broken, kept, worthless and of value.

Jewelry that you no longer wear, made of gold or silver, worn links, broken clasps. There are memories…. A medallion of horn, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, worn daily as a teenager in their heyday, the 1960s, just like the gold link bracelet.
A precious coral brooch you never wore, too much of a jewel, too fine.
Cufflinks, received as a keepsake.

But also a damaged Japanese lacquer box, an ebony violin key.
A milk tooth, no idea whose.
A jat that you don’t know how you got it.
Shells and pieces of coral collected by your mother in Indonesia in the late 1940s.
Tin figures.
The charm chain full of silver creatures, people, things, objects around your neck, each with their meaning. Ringing worn and cherished.

I’m putting them all back in the spotlight. I prefer to immortalize them forever.
I isolate or disassemble them, I combine them and give them a second life in a composition with pearls and rabbit droppings sprinkled in between. Together they grow into new, tiny stories in the form of a brooch. New life.

© Beppe Kessler