b. 1973, Switzerland
Born in 1973 in Geneva, Harumi Klossowska de Rola lives and works in Switzerland. She began designing haute joaillerie in 2008, and has since created pieces for luxury brands including Boucheron, Chopard, Van Cleef & Arpels, Valentino and Goossens.
In her practice today, Harumi creates powerful sculptural works and delicately crafted jewellery inspired by the flora and fauna of the natural world. Her first encounter with a collection of precious gems at the age of seven captivated her imagination and inspired a lasting fascination with jewels and the splendour of nature. Over the years she has developed a unique and sensitive rendering of creatures great and small, often fusing the aesthetic with the functional and creating, in her words, ‘something that you can wear, or you can exhibit on a shelf’.
In creating works of sculpture in bronze, Harumi enters into a tradition that stretches back millennia. Early civilisations began creating statues to celebrate their deities and legendary heroes, immortalising them in bronze, beginning a long history of bronze statuary of both human and animal figures. The history of metalwork has been, with a few exceptions, a robustly masculine discipline, with the great sculptors and humble metalsmiths alike almost exclusively male. However, in the late nineteenth century female artists such as Camille Claudel definitively disrupted this narrative, paving the way for more to follow in their footsteps. With her practice today, Harumi Klossowska de Rola continues to challenge the conventions of bronze sculpture while still building on the great tradition of metal statuary of the animal form, showing how strength, delicacy and beauty can co-exist in sculptures infused with their maker’s intimate knowledge and profound respect of the natural world.