Case WOW! The exhibition of works from the International Jewellery Collection of the Gallery of Art in Legnica

Venue: Qubus Hotel (2 Skarbowa St.)
Dates: 26 April – 20 July 2025
Opening: 10 May 2025

Admission free

The exhibition showcases selected jewellery and goldsmithing works from the International Collection of Contemporary Jewellery from the Gallery of Art in Legnica. The presented pieces refer to the main theme of the Legnica Jewellery Festival SILVER 2025, The WOW Effect!, and serve as “little WOWs” representing the Gallery’s extensive collection.

Today, the Legnica collection comprises nearly half a thousand works, bearing witness to the richness of contexts, techniques, materials, and ways of thinking about jewellery – from speculation on the traditional notion of ornament, through a medium for conveying messages and expressing the artist’s views, to a conceptual artwork in which the physical object gives way to the idea. The International Collection of Contemporary Jewellery serves as both a visual representation and documentation of how jewellery can be used to communicate artistic meaning. The purely decorative aspect moves to the background while the jewellery itself gains the status of an autonomous work of contemporary art. The Legnica collection includes works by leading artists, goldsmiths and designers from almost all over the world.

The Gallery’s collection is continuously expanded thanks to donations from artists as well as funding from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2013, 2014, 2016) and the KGHM Polska Miedź Foundation (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).

Legnica Jewellery Festival SILVER – one of the largest and longest-running exhibition events in Europe devoted to broadly understood contemporary authors’ jewellery. The history of jewellery exhibitions organised by the Gallery of Art in Legnica dates back to 1979. The Festival’s most important event is the International Jewellery Competition, which has already had 33 editions and annually attracts around 300 artists from approximately 40 countries. Each edition is held under a different theme, referring to significant and universal issues and challenges of the modern world and people – approached from social, cultural, sociological or anthropological perspectives of everyday life.

The Festival also includes hundreds of curated exhibitions and accompanying publications. As part of the About the Artists, Silver Schools, and Debuts series, we present both renowned artists with extensive bodies of work and students of art academies specialising in jewellery design and making.

Each year in May – during the Grand Opening of the Festival – Legnica welcomes artists, experts and enthusiasts of avant-garde jewellery. Numerous exhibitions, meetings, discussions, the Boundaries of Global Art conference and the awards ceremony of the International Jewellery Competition take place in several venues across the city centre.

Georg Dobler, Neo classic brooch, oxidised silver, synthetic rubies, citrines, handmade stone settings, classical, stone cut, 60 x 70 mm, 2012

Eva Fernandez Martos, Pearl Necklace 2, wood, mother of pearl, cord, paint, 150 x 75 x 15 mm, 610 mm, 2023

Aya Iwata, Kumonoie (House in the Clouds) brooch/urn, fine silver, silver 950, enamel, lemon quartz, 82 x 28 x 60 mm, 2022

Peter Machata, Live for pain pendant, silver, aluminum 130×63×10 mm, 2023