Gijs Bakker – Dutch sculptor & jewellery, furniture & lighting designer.

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Stovepipe Necklace by Gijs Bakker
Stovepipe Necklace by Gijs Bakker

Contemporary jewellery and furniture

Gijs Bakker (Amersfoort, b.1942) was a Dutch sculptor, jewellery designer, furniture and lighting designer.

Education

Bakker is a jeweller, sculptor, furniture designer, and, to a lesser extent, industrial designer who studied gold and silversmithing at the Amsterdam Art Academy. He and his late wife, Emmy van Leersum, were pioneers in the field of modern jewellery.

Biography

They began in the mid-1960s by creating and producing aluminium collars and bracelets. They loved the material’s lightness and malleability. Still, they chose it principally because it was non-precious and of no particular class. During the 1970s, they expanded their work into art, performance, and sculpture. The human body became a significant aspect of the jewellery, rather than just the thing on which it was hung.

Bakker made some massive neckpieces out of colour pictures sandwiched between Plexiglas in the mid-1980s. These were both amusing and lovely examples of lateral thinking.

Bakker has been designing furniture since 1972, and he has also designed a lot of products. The strip chair (1974) and the finger chair (1976) are two of his chairs (1979). He, like the majority of design consultants, has always been adamant about not working for a single client. “The designer, in my opinion, should be someone who is outside the firm for which he works, who comes to understand it but remains detached,” he argues.

Sources

Byars, M., & Riley, T. (2004). The design encyclopedia. Laurence King Publishing.

Dormer, P. (1991). The illustrated dictionary of twentieth-century designers: the key personalities in design and the applied arts. Mallard Press.

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