Jewelry designer Chus Burés shows the Big Apple his most special creations

When the gallery owner Juana de Aizpuru made room for him between exhibitions by Jaume Plensa and Cristina Iglesias, a young Chus Burés, recently arrived from Barcelona to Madrid, could not imagine that the opportunity to show his first jewelry would take him to Louise Bourgeois. or Carmen Herrera, two artists with whom he began to collaborate immediately. It was 1985, those happy eighties, the time of creative explosion of the capital and its movement, and Burés, who was then 22 years old, stood out as a restless, effervescent talent, who decades later has refined his work with maturity, but with identical nonconformity.

Collectors from around the world, especially from the United States and France, have his pieces, and now, coinciding with an exhibition in his Madrid studio of jewelry created in collaboration with the architect and Columbia professor Juan Herreros, he exhibits his most creative side (“ less constrained by the requirements of the market,” he explains) at the Americas Society in New York: he is the first Spanish artist to whom the society opens its rooms. The New York exhibition is titled Art as ornament —until next May 18, 2024—and includes the designer’s collaboration with a dozen Latin American artists in recent decades. The selection of Burés jewelry is the epilogue of an interesting group exhibition titled Eldorado (Golden Myths)with revisions and reinterpretations by more than 70 artists from Latin America about that kind of grail of the American continent.

Burés’s relationship with the United States dates back to the mid-eighties: the creator has always been precocious and pioneering at the same time. Exhibited in the institution’s library, as a culmination of the visit to the group exhibition, Burés’s jewels review not only his career, but also the main trends in Latin American art of recent decades. From his collaboration with the kinetic artist Jesús Rafael Soto to the consecrated Carmen Herrera, passing through the Cuban Kcho, with whom he designed two beautiful allegories of the desire to flee the island: a winged boat and a branch ending in the shovel of a rowing. Other artists represented in Art as ornament They are Antonio Asís, Tony Bechara, Carlos Cruz-Díez, Sérvulo Esmeraldo, Macaparana, Marie Orensanz, to name just a few of the dozen collaborators.

“This exhibition shows the most experimental part of my work,” a constant dimension in his career, since its beginnings, explains Burés in New York, one of the three cities where he operates (the others are Madrid and Paris). “Working with artists allows you to avoid parameters such as cost or investment that do determine the creation of jewelry intended for the market. You can play with the most experimental part, and there is a collection that seeks precisely this type of jewelry, that wants the original. It is a market of demanding clients who value the idea, the pure creation, because what interests me is the exchange, the dialogue with the artist.” That, and his obsession “with making art.” “wearable” (wearable, wearable), explain their commitment to conceptually elevate the jewelry they create.

Burés has earned a loyal legion of collectors, especially in the United States and France; In Spain, he triumphs among Catalans. His relationship with his client-friends also goes beyond the usual commercial relationship to become another celebration of art. An elegant book that can be leafed through at the New York exhibition portrays his creations, worn, as if they were decorations rather than jewels, by artist friends and collectors. With photographs by Andrés Serrano and Antoine d’Agata, the volume opens with the image that in 2015 immortalized a venerable Carmen Herrera as a matriarch, with the geometric brooch that she designed with Burés closing her shawl. The book is also a celebration of friendship, or at least the special relationship of intimacy that is forged between creators.

After studying Interior Design in Barcelona, ​​his hometown, and learning the jewelry trade in various workshops in the Catalan capital and Madrid, Burés embraced unusual and unconventional materials, such as industrial waste, metals and recyclable objects of various shapes and origins. But the exhibition in Juana de Aizpuru’s gallery, a selection of silver works, made him abandon experimentation – although the stimulus to innovate has never abandoned him, he defines himself as a “multi-material sculptor” – and that same year, In 1985, director Pedro Almodóvar commissioned him to create the pitchfork and murder weapon for his film. Bullfighter, a silver treble clef—inspired by the Andalusian fence—that opened the doors to the international market. Until today: his studio in the New York neighborhood of Chelsea is one of those secret and coveted addresses, which are passed from hand to hand among intimates.

Five years later, in 1990, Burés definitively sealed his love relationship with New York, with his contribution to the wedding trousseau of two unique bride and groom: the nuptials of the Statue of Liberty and the Columbus Monument in Barcelona, ​​the artist’s project Catalan Antoni Miralda in the Spanish pavilion at the XLIV Venice Art Biennale. Since that wedding, Burés seems like just another New Yorker, in no way different from the enjoy and at the same time busy urbanites who give life to the Big Apple. His latest exhibition in the heart of Manhattan, which is added to a dozen previous exhibitions, confirms that it is.

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