"Pendants Pending" earrings

In 1967 designer GianCarlo Montebello opened the GEM MONTEBELLO workshop in Milan with the express intention of collaborating with European and American artists. Seeking to erase the boundaries between art and craft, the atelier took advantage of Milan's longstanding goldsmithing tradition to create specially designed art jewelry. Man Ray designed the Pendants Pending earrings based on a series of spiral-form lampshade sculptures he created in the early twentieth century. In about 1970, Gem Montebello made an edition of twelve pairs of these large-scale earrings, which hang almost to the collarbone. The earrings convey Man Ray's Surrealist ideas in their impressive scale, unusual use of a domestic object as inspiration for personal adornment, and punning title.