The award committee's motivation

"This year's winner is a jewelry engineer. With his objects, he takes us on a journey through a mechanical fairytale landscape, full of boyhood dreams and romantic and lustful pranks. Sigurd Bronger takes us back to the early idioms of industrialism and the inventions of the Renaissance, or to the utopian visions of the future. Time is a material alongside precious metals, diamonds and wood, all carefully selected and worked on during a long, solid process."

Sigurd Bronger is a jewelry designer who works in the small-scale and delicate sphere; between the mechanical industrialism of the early 1900s, humor, love of the material, time and the refined.

Bronger's jewelry transcends gender, even if the process is playfully masculine - with gears, fine mechanics and gorgeous handmade packaging.

He treats time as a material, alongside brass, precious metals, diamonds and wood - all carefully selected and worked on during a long and thorough process. He told us when the jury visited his studio in Oslo that he creates 3-4 new objects a year.

Industrial romanticism characterizes Sigurd Bronger's jewellery and his inspiration is instruments and machines. When I see and feel Bronger's jewelry, I feel like a little boy visiting a carnival or caught up in a strange fairytale mechanical world - I forget everything else around me.

"Sigurd Bronger's design art changes my view of what is possible," says Ted Hesselbom, Director of the Röhsska Museum.

The prize was awarded at a ceremony at the University of Gothenburg on November 5, 2012. During the period November 2012 to February 2013, Sigurd Bronger showed a selection of his objects at an exhibition at the Röhsska Museum.

documentary film

A short documentary about Sigurd Bronger where we get a closer look at the artist and designer. The film is made by Stavfel production.

Sigurd Bronger
Sigurd Bronger was born in Oslo in 1957. He trained as a goldsmith at Oslo Yrkesskole and studied jewelry and watchmaking at Vakschool Schonhooven and engraving at the Royal Stamp Factory in Amsterdam. Since 1987 he has worked as a technician at NRK. Sigurd Bronger makes jewelry that is meant to be worn. He uses materials such as wood, brass and precious metals and combines these with eggs, balloons or glass lenses. Fine mechanics are mixed with humor. He is a frequent exhibitor and has shown his objects at the National Museum in Stockholm and Kunsthall in Bergen, among others. Gallery RA in Amsterdam is his permanent partner and one of the few to sell his jewelry.
 Sigurd Bronger has received several awards, including the Norwegian Goldsmiths Design Award in both 1996 and 2004. The book "Laboratorium Mechanum" presents all his works. 

sigbronger.no