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Different materials, different techniques, and different concepts. Jewelry by dozens of students from the studios of the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (FDU) will be part of a prestigious international showcase in Munich, Germany, this week. The Bavarian metropolis is hosting Munich Jewellery Week from Wednesday, March 4 to Sunday, March 8. The independent festival has been a parallel event to the traditional international craft fair in Munich for decades. Unlike it, however, it perceives and presents jewelry making mainly as an art. The management of the Metalworking and Jewellery Studio at FDU has the same approach.

"While the traditional concept of jewelry is based on a material object and craftsmanship, contemporary practice increasingly works with process, participation, or digital representation. Jewelry can manifest itself as a performative act or a purely media image," explained Martin Verner, head of the Metalworking and Jewellery Studio at FDU UWB. This is precisely why he also teaches jewelry-making as an art, not a design discipline. "Craft is the foundation, but we are not in high school. I want students to develop intellectually," added Verner. Participation in the Munich Jewellery Week festival is of great value to the Sutnar Faculty. According to Verner, Munich, as the epicenter of contemporary designer jewelry, is an ideal place to confront one's own work with the global context and monitor where the field is heading.

For students from Pilsen, the main event of the jewelry festival is participation in the 1st International Jewelry Student Summit at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. On Friday, March 6, students from 42 countries from all five continents will present their work there. Their pop-up exhibitions were explicitly created for this evening. Representatives of all universities that teach jewelry will arrive from the Czech Republic. In addition to the Sutnar Faculty, students from Prague's UMPRUM and the Technical University in Liberec's Jablonec campus are also heading to Bavaria.

Jewelers from the FDU are also part of the exhibition The Forms of Things Unknown at the Munich bookstore Kubula. In cooperation with the Czech Center in Munich, this will showcase works by Czech artists exploring poetic concepts in contemporary jewelry design. The UWB Metalworking and Jewellery Studio will be exhibited there by teacher Miroslava Veselá and third-year student and artistic blacksmith Richard Rulf. As he himself said, he is mainly attracted to assemblages combining stone, silver, and steel. "Jewelry is a discipline in which I devote myself to current trends, while in realizations in public space I stick to more traditional techniques," Rulf summarized. In addition, his work impressed the jury in Munich, which selected about 80 works from among 600 applicants for the competitive student show TALENTEMünchen - Meister der Zukunft 2026, held as part of the concurrent international craft fair.

Thirteen students from Pilsen also participated in an open call by the Dutch gallery WearHouse as part of the festival. The aim of the call ALL IN was to invite artists from various fields to apply and, together, explore what contemporary jewelry actually is. The public will then decide, through a competition, what people like or dislike today. Teachers Martin Verner and Miroslava Veselá from the Sutnar Faculty also participated in the ALL IN call. All works will be on display from March 4 at the WearHouse gallery in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.