Engelbert presents Still Life: in conversation with Michael Altman Fine Art

For this presentation, Engelbert jewellery was shown alongside works by Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp, Lucio Fontana and Willem de Kooning, drawn from the holdings of Michael Altman Fine Art, and Swedish studio ceramics by Wilhelm Kåge, Berndt Friberg and Stig Lindberg, drawn from the Engelbert private collection. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, and jewellery are held on the same plane. The pieces appear not as set decoration but as fellow protagonists — each treated as a study in the same vocabulary of weight, line and surface.

The pairing is deliberate, and the ceramics are not incidental to it. The decades in which Engelbert was founded were the decades in which Brancusi was carving the Endless Column, Giacometti was arriving in Paris, Arp was shaping his first biomorphic reliefs, and Lucio Fontana — long before he opened a canvas — was working in clay. In Stockholm, in the same years, Wilhelm Kåge was reshaping what ceramics could be at Gustavsberg, and his successors, Berndt Friberg and Stig Lindberg, would carry that work into the century. The house has spent four generations within this wider conversation, working at a smaller scale but inside the same questions — how form distils, how a surface holds light, how material decides what is possible.

In the room, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and jewellery were held on the same plane. The pieces appeared not as set decoration but as fellow protagonists - each treated as a study in the same vocabulary of weight, line and surface.

Still Life is conceived as a continuing programme. Each instalment will place Engelbert in conversation with a different artistic context, drawn from private collections, galleries and collaborators. The intention is not retrospective. It is to make visible the company the house has always kept.

Photography — Adrian Gaut,
Installation Design — Akari Endo-Gaut