Fabulous Clip Earrings with very Large Pacific Corals in Gold, c. 1985

Postmodern architecture loved to play with historical quotations. After decades of modernism propagating smooth surfaces and unadorned functionality, the 1970s and 1980s saw a return to ornamentation and decorative exaggeration. Façades were given new depth, colors returned and historical motifs were reinterpreted with tongue-in-cheek delight. The so-called bossed ashlar façade was particularly popular. Even in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, palaces were decorated with protruding stone ashlars to demonstrate power and monumentality as well as wealth. Postmodernism took up this motif again, albeit now often in a playfully alienated and deliberately decorative manner. Famous architects such as Ricardo Bofill or Michael Graves worked with exaggerated ashlar façades that were intended to quote historical architecture and at the same time ironically break with it. A wonderful example of this is the residential ensemble Les Espaces d'Abraxas near Paris, designed by Bofill, whose monumental façades look like a fantastic reinterpretation of ancient palace architecture. These ear clips from the 1980s remind us of precisely such ashlars. Two extraordinarily large corals in a square sugar loaf cut adorn their front sides. The high domed and tapered surfaces of the precious corals look like miniature architectural bodies. The two corals are set in simple, geometrically structured gold frames, whose clear lines further emphasize the monumental effect of the corals. The corals used here together weigh around 84 carats. The result is ear clips that breathe the spirit of postmodernism: self-confident, sculptural and with great pleasure in combining historical worlds of form. The pair came to us from a collection of high-quality jewellery in Stuttgart

Estimate:£12,538.05

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