The Amberif Design Award competition is one of the most important international events promoting creativity in the world of artistic jewellery. Every year, it attracts designers from all over the world who rediscover Baltic amber in their work - as an inspiring, contemporary and highly malleable material. It is a space for experimentation, courage and artistic dialogue between nature and modern design. Thanks to its open formula and prestigious jury, the competition not only indicates trends, but also sets the directions in which contemporary goldsmithing is developing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It has become a tradition of the AMBERIF International Fair of Amber and Jewellery - apart from its core function of effectively bringing together Buyers and Sellers - to support non-commercial activities aimed at promoting Baltic amber. The international Amberif Design Award competition, which brings together artists who use amber in their artistic work, is one such event with an already established, extremely high reputation. The international design competition Amberif Design Award, which attracts the attention of artists who use amber in their artistic work, is one of the most renowned events of its kind. Every year the post-competition exhibition becomes a field of confrontation of artistic expressions on a specific topic concerning amber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to established artists, goldsmiths and designers with recognisable names, young designers - mostly students and graduates of art academies - also present their ideas, for whom the competition exhibition sets the stage for spectacular debuts, with the attractive prize - funded by the Mayor of the City of Gdansk - being an additional motivation. The ever-increasing number of participants confirms the inspiring role of the Amberif Design Award as an important artistic and industry event not only in Poland. The participants of the past editions of the competition come both from Western European countries with well-established art education systems, but - which is particularly important - also creators and artists from Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine and even such exotic countries as Taiwan or Mexico. This allows us to hope that these creators will also be faithful to amber in their further artistic and design endeavours, systematically raising the level of amber jewellery design and its rank among recipients worldwide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Certainly the promotional aspect of amber is one of the primary and most important reasons why the continuous development of the Amberif Design Award is so important for the entire amber industry, even if, contrary to the expectations of some manufacturers, it does not provide ready-to-copy designs and solutions. Thanks to it, however, there is a sufficiently legitimate excuse for many young, creative designers who feel invited to compete every year, and a large number of them remain in the market, independently implementing and developing ideas provoked by the theme of the competition, from which whole collections are often created; the artists themselves - already as exhibitors at Amberif - achieve further successes not only artistically but also in the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the moment, we are also witnessing the tidying up of the professional design services market, which large manufacturing companies are starting to use more and more boldly and effectively. Computer-assisted 3D design combined with advanced prototype generation technologies referred to as \u201crapid prototyping\u201d are posing a serious challenge to traditional craftsmanship, and will require a new way of product creation and new professional competencies from designers. This is why the Amberif Design Award - by design - has become a kind of \u201claboratory\u201d of form, in which solutions are sought that go far beyond today's stylistic standards resulting from the current demand of manufacturers. Artistic experiments, author's comments and statements often in a radical and controversial form, objects on the borderline of jewellery and body art, looking for references to other fields of fine arts allow us, the viewers, to look at Baltic amber beyond the stereotype known from a jewellery shop and see unexpected qualities in it. The themes of the Gdansk competitions, which focus the artists\u201c attention on specific qualities of this unusual material in the broadest possible context of cultural phenomena and processes, serve to expose them. In addition to themes referring to myths, symbols and emotions (e.g. \u201dAmber Trail\u201c, \u201dInclusion\u201c, \u201dNatural Mystic\u201c, \u201dSymbols of Love\u201c), editions of the Amberif Design Award referring to the search for the right neighbourhood for amber (e.g. \u201dAmber + Diamond\u201c, \u201dAmber + Gold\u201c, \u201dOrganic Product\") provided extremely interesting interpretations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The prestige of the competition is confirmed by the names of the foreign and Polish jurors: artists, educators from prestigious universities, trade journalists and amber experts, to name but a few.Among them are Wilhelm Tasso Mattar - Germany, Manuel Vilhena - Portugal, Michael Zobel - Germany, Barbara Schmidt - co-organiser of the Munich fair inhorgenta europe, Veronika Schwarzinger - owner of Galerie V + V in Vienna, as well as many distinguished teachers of Polish art academies: prof. Stanis\u0142aw Radwa\u0144ski (former Rector, ASP Gda\u0144sk), Prof. Jacek Popek (Head of the Department of Design, ASP Gda\u0144sk), Prof. Czes\u0142awa Frejlich (ASP Krak\u00f3w, editor-in-chief of the quarterly 2+3D), as well as leading Polish designers of designer jewellery and amber designers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
10 years of the Amberif Design Award <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The year 2006 marked the 10th anniversary of the Amberif Design Award, and it is certainly a good excuse to assess and perhaps revise the current formula of the competition, which has both numerous supporters and few critics. The history of the competition not only documents the evolution of initially Polish, and later also international, creativity with amber as its subject, but also reflects the extent of the political changes that have taken place in Poland over the past decade. At the very beginning of the competition, a major problem was the complicated customs formalities that made it difficult for participants from outside Poland to send in finished works or jewellery made of amber. These were treated as exports and artists - most often students at art colleges or individual artists not involved in business - were required to complete onerous and bureaucratic procedures. Since the intention of the organisers was to promote the advantages and qualities of Baltic amber primarily outside Poland, special care was taken to internationalise the rules of the Amberif Design Award. The argument of not exposing foreign participants to additional costs and sparing them from having to wade through the meanders of customs forms was the basis for the decision to expect designs in drawing, graphic or photographic form, presented on boards instead of finished works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although for several years now, thanks to Poland's membership in the European Union, customs barriers have no longer been an obstacle or even a hindrance to sending finished amber works, the Amberif Design Award competition has retained the formula of a design review. The development of graphic techniques, tools for visualising designs, and finally the spread of computer programmes for three-dimensional design justify the legibility of this form of recording ideas and their presentation. However, there are still - especially in Poland - questions, doubts and suggestions that point to the need for the presentation of finished objects, especially in the context of the possibility of discounting the results of the Amberif Design Award competition to promote Baltic amber even more effectively as a means of artistic expression. The institution that should obviously concentrate its interest in this form of initiating artistic and exhibition events is the one opened in 2006. Amber Museum in Gdansk<\/a>. It is certain that the further development of the Museum and its concentration on the subject of amber will result in the Amberif Design Award finding an exhibition space worthy of its stature that will also enable the presentation of the most interesting original works of authorship, and perhaps some of them will be able to feed the contemporary art collections of the Gda\u0144sk Amber Museum. It is certain that in the near future the Gda\u0144sk International Fair and the Gda\u0144sk museum will work out a new formula for the exhibition and presentation of the competition entries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n An argument in favour of the exclusively design-oriented character of the competition and the post-competition exhibition to date is the still undisputed fact that it enables the presentation not only of the products of master craftsmen, which are most often of a commercial nature, but also provides an opportunity to confront ideas of a conceptual nature that are often impossible to put into practice and go beyond the limitations of execution or technology. There have already been many futuristic proposals at competitions, boldly breaking with the canon of traditional craft and seeking contact with other fields of art, as well as those relating to socio-cultural contexts and even philosophical issues, which would never become the subject of artistic interpretation were it not for the possibility of an intermediate - drawing, graphic or photographic - form of presentation allowed by the competition rules. Those invited to take part in the competition are not only amber and goldsmiths, professionals who routinely deal with this material, but also designers of industrial forms, designers and stylists as well as artists working in the fields of sculpture, painting, installation and non-utilitarian art - especially students at art colleges throughout Europe. An important and unfounded hope of the organisers is that the competition will stimulate its participants to further creative experiments with Baltic amber, and for some of them it will become the beginning of a systematic artistic quest which will point the whole amber community, as well as the professional public, in new and inspiring directions for the development of contemporary amber art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prof. S\u0142awomir Fija\u0142kowski<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has become a tradition of the AMBERIF International Fair of Amber and Jewellery - in addition to its core function of effectively bringing together Buyers and Sellers - to support non-commercial activities to promote Baltic amber.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":26913,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"slim_seo":{"title":"Amberif Design Award - Amber Portal","description":"It has become a tradition of the AMBERIF International Fair of Amber and Jewellery - in addition to its core function of effectively bringing together Buyers and Sellers - to support the"}},"tags":[148],"lokalizacja":[],"temat":[228],"class_list":["post-13755","bursztyn","type-bursztyn","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-amberif","temat-konkursy-cykliczne"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bursztyn\/13755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bursztyn"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bursztyn"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13755"},{"taxonomy":"lokalizacja","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lokalizacja?post=13755"},{"taxonomy":"temat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amber.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/temat?post=13755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}