The exhibition 1000 Rings celebrates the remarkable career of Karl Fritsch: a goldsmith and artist born 1963 in Sonthofen, Germany, and now based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

1000 Rings opens at Objectspace in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in March 2027 before travelling to QAGOMA, Brisbane, to be part of the Asia Pacific Triennial. Following this, the exhibition will be toured internationally. 1000 Rings is curated by Kim Paton and developed and delivered by Objectspace.

Karl Fritsch is recognised worldwide as one of the most influential figures in contemporary jewellery. His work blends masterful craftsmanship with rebellious humour, material innovation, and a distinctively expressive style. Across four decades he has made work at the edges of jewellery and sculpture. Each ring is one of a kind – a miniature artwork that challenges how we think about value, beauty, and purpose.

1000 Rings draws together (more than) 1000 rings, seen en masse and across time, the work tracks the evolution of his making, and his enduring love of the singular ring form.

Set within an immersive treasure room designed by Fritsch in collaboration with exhibition designer Micheal McCabe, 1000 Rings is an immersive display. Visitors are invited to step into the world of Fritsch – a poetic, subversive realm where a ring is more than just jewellery; it’s an idea, an object, and a statement all at once.

This exhibition honours Fritsch as a boundary-breaking artist, and a key figure among those who see jewellery as its own artistic language. 1000 Rings is both a retrospective and an immersive spatial experience – a manifesto of free unconventional thinking in contemporary art and craft.

Please contact the gallery for all touring and media enquiries: 
info@objectspace.org.nz
+64 9 376 6216

“Of course the ring wants to be beautiful. The technique also wants to be beautiful and most often it’s the idea that wants to be the most beautiful. But sometimes a ring likes nothing better than to sit in the mud and not give a damn about how it looks. If it’s exactly what it wants to be in a given moment, it is precise, perfect, and the most beautiful.” – Karl Fritsch

Biography:

Karl Fritsch has gained international recognition for his ever-developing body of work, which has focused almost solely on rings. Fritsch’s jewellery is unmistakable. His works vary from hand-moulded one-off castings, to dantier re-cast jewel-embedded rings, to towering stacks of cut and colourful glass. His ability to continually create new rings is vast and varied. Combining traditional techniques, playing on jewellery history, Fritsch has developed his own personal language. He is capable of applying both careful and quick consideration to the materials and objects he works with, and employs precious and base metals, faceted and found stones in his work with egalitarian abandon, turning the most ordinary into the extraordinary.

Born in Germany in 1962, Fritsch was classically trained at the Goldsmith’s College in Pforzheim, and then attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He has exhibited extensively, presented guest lectures around the world and his work is held in private and public collections internationally, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Pinakothek of Modern Art in Munich, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the Herbert Hoffman Prize from the International Craftsmen Trade Fair in Munich and the prestigious jury-selected Francoise van den Bosch Award (2006), given every two years to an international jewellery and object maker who is recognised for their oeuvre, influence and contribution to the field.

Fritsch moved to Aotearoa New Zealand with his family in 2010, and
now lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.