On the eve of his show at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, in Winter 2009 Joseph McBrinn considered the unique aesthetic Rudolf Heltzel has brought to jewellery design.
This winter the Hunt Museum in Limerick plays host to a major exhibition of work by the distinguished metalworker and jeweller Rudolf Heltzel. ‘The Devil is in the Detail: Celebrating the Jewellery of Rudolf Heltzel’ provides an overview of current work by the artist. Challenging the politics of value created by the combination of gem stones and their settings in modern jewellery has been the cornerstone of Heltzel’s work. The design historian Hilary O’Kelly has stated that ‘Heltzel’s handmade, chunky silver and gold jewellery’ is easy to recognise but the ‘richly coloured’ stones are not ‘necessarily identifiable.’ Heltzel’s new work contains, aside from sapphires and diamonds, non-precious stones such as agate, pearl, quartz, carnelian, onyx, topaz, and tourmaline often playing on the unique beauty found in their oxidisation and crystallisation
