From December 12, 2025 through February 1, 2026, the 10·Corso·Como Gallery in Milan presents Bernhard Schobinger. Democracy of Materials, an exhibition that brings radical intelligence and poetic force to the language of contemporary jewelry. Curated by Alessio de’ Navasques and realized in collaboration with Galleria Martina Simeti, the show traces more than four decades of work by Swiss artist Bernhard Schobinger, revealing an oeuvre that moves freely between adornment and sculpture, ritual object and spatial intervention.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a sustained meditation on value. Schobinger’s practice dismantles inherited hierarchies of preciousness, dissolving the boundary between noble metals and discarded matter. Gold, silver, diamonds, and pearls appear alongside rubber bands, industrial fragments, shards of glass, nails, gaskets, and found objects marked by use and erosion. These materials meet through an exacting technical intelligence rooted in the artist’s early training as a goldsmith, yet animated by an enduring refusal of convention. Each work asserts itself as singular, resisting repetition and industrial logic, and carrying the aura of an amulet shaped by experience rather than market worth.
Installed as a series of thematic islands, the exhibition unfolds through a dynamic, almost narrative spatial choreography. Historical furnishings from 10·Corso·Como are woven into the display, encouraging a wandering gaze that echoes the idea of psychogeography and the associative journeys found in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a text long admired by the artist. The result is an environment that feels less like a linear retrospective and more like a constellation of encounters, where time collapses and materials speak across decades.
Works from the early 1980s to the present reveal a practice continually reshaped by tension and contradiction. Jewelry designed to be worn expands into sculpture that defies the body, while sculptural forms retain the intimacy of personal adornment. A necklace composed of elastic bands binding precious crystals proposes fragility as strength. Silver casts of everyday ice-cream spoons form a bracelet that transforms a banal gesture into an architecture of memory. Antique brass handles rotate into abstract signs, hovering between language and object. Throughout, Schobinger’s compositions expose the latent energy of fragments, cuts, and remnants, as if matter itself were charged with a secret life.
The exhibition also illuminates the intellectual and spiritual dimensions that underpin this material freedom. Early encounters with the rigor of Swiss Concrete Art gave way to a more insurgent vocabulary shaped by the punk movements of the late 1970s and the social unrest of Zurich in the 1980s. Later, an engagement with Eastern philosophies and Zen Buddhism introduced a disciplined detachment, allowing paradox to become a productive force.
Scissors, safety pins, saws, and blade-like elements recur as koan-like forms, objects that invite contemplation through contradiction. Color appears as a shamanic mark, with traces of red urushi lacquer or enamel transforming industrial surfaces into vessels of meaning.
10 Corso Como, Bernhard Schobinger. Democracy of materials, Under Water Car Collection
Several works articulate a distinctly cosmic imagination. Necklaces assembled from toy cars retrieved from the depths of Lake Zurich, fishing hooks arranged into mythic configurations, and shells sourced from Okinawa suggest submerged worlds and distant geographies. These compositions resonate with a sense of archaeology projected forward in time, envisioning a future where natural materials have vanished and fragments bear the weight of collective memory. Even destruction becomes generative, as damaged panels, pierced metal, and weathered components are reconfigured into constellations that shimmer with pearls and gemstones.
Schobinger’s sustained influence is underscored by his presence in major international museum collections, including institutions in London, Paris, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, and Munich, and by accolades such as the Françoise van den Bosch Award and the Swiss Grand Prix of Design. Yet this exhibition resists the language of summary or closure. Instead, it offers an immersive reflection on how objects can carry thought, how adornment can function as philosophy, and how materials, freed from hierarchy, can narrate the self.
Bernhard Schobinger. Democracy of Materials continues 10·Corso·Como’s ongoing investigation into ornament as a contemporary medium within its renewed cultural program under Tiziana Fausti. With free admission and daily opening hours, the exhibition invites Milan’s audiences and international visitors alike to encounter jewelry as an existential proposition, worn close to the body and the mind.
