Attai Chen / Terra Mutantica
Any, and all, matter, process, theory, or thought can be the stuff of Israeli Attai Chen’s jewelry. He has carved wood, layered paper, fused silver, and even gold-plated anchovies, to express his purposeful, albeit humorous, aesthetic. In Chen’s latest series — the subject of a 2014 solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art — Chen combines twigs, toy parts, repurposed plastic, and metal that have been drawn on with graphite, and painted with pigment, glass color, or nail varnish, to fashion assemblages, which speak lovingly of gestation, growth, and decay — some of his perpetual topics. A graduate of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, he also holds a graduate degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In 2010, Chen won the Herbert Hofmann Prize at Schmuck, Munich and in 2011 the Oberbayerischer Prize for Applied Art. He received the 2014 Andy Prize for Contemporary Art, which granted him the above-mentioned exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Chen is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Die Neue Sammlung, Munich.