There is something almost countercultural about Brigitta B. Horváth’s work right now. At a time when public discourse seems to thrive on conflict, this Hungarian goldsmith and artist comes to Munich Jewellery Week 2026 with jewellery that is, at its core, about gentleness, about hands that choose not to harm. Her exhibition Metaphor of Hands, presented at Handwerk & Design, Messe München (Hall B1, Stand 627) from 4 to 8 March, brings together a brooch series and jewellery collections built on nearly thirty years of research into metal, form, and the gestures we make with our hands.
The Exhibition
Horváth has always followed an organic, metaphysical, minimalist path. But Metaphor of Hands carries something more. It arrives at a moment when the world seems to have forgotten the value of gentleness, and it responds not with anger, but with hope. A hope that feels necessary, perhaps even urgent. The exhibition is a vision and a wish at once: that we might choose, in each moment, to use our hands to caress rather than to harm, to offer rather than to take. Each piece, a hand extended, a palm open, fingers softly curled, speaks a language that needs no translation, drawn from gestures humanity has always shared. Horváth renders them in metal, giving permanence to what is fleeting, and shape to what is felt.
Touch is where the exhibition begins, and where it quietly returns. It is the first thing we know when we enter the world: warmth, skin, the presence of another. Long before words, before the clarity of sight, we learn the world through contact, and it is to this primal knowledge that Horváth returns, again and again. Her works are made to be felt as much as seen. Visitors are invited to encounter form through their hands, as though sight itself had learned to listen. In that moment, something shifts: the distance between maker, object, and beholder grows thin. Touch becomes the thread that connects jewel to viewer, viewer to artist, and artist, in an unbroken, quietly hopeful gesture, to all of humanity.
„I have been working with metal for nearly 30 years, researching transformations of form and human gestures. These gestures appear in my jewellery in the form of variations on shape transformations, because I believe that humanity cannot move forward through struggle and harm. The key lies in communication and turning towards one another.” — Brigitta B. Horváth
The Artist
Brigitta B. Horváth has been working with metal for thirty years. That kind of sustained commitment is rarer than it sounds. Trained as a goldsmith in Pécs and then as an applied arts designer in Sopron, she spent a formative year on scholarship at the Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia in Surakarta, Java, an experience that left a lasting mark on how she thinks about gesture, ritual, and the meaning carried in physical form. She belongs to a generation of makers who sit uncomfortably between categories; too craft-oriented for the contemporary art world, too conceptual for the traditional market. A member of the Hungarian Association of Fine and Applied Artists and the Komorebi Group, she continues to work with classical techniques like chiseling and copperwork, disciplines that are genuinely disappearing from contemporary jewellery practice, while also embracing 3D design and new materials. It is an unusual combination, and it shows in the work.
In 2025 she received both the Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and the Award of the Hungarian Association of Fine and Applied Artists at the XV Goldsmithing Biennial. Over the past two years her work has been shown in Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam, Gothenburg, Paris, Venice, Athens, Porto, and Munich, a circuit that places her firmly within the international contemporary jewellery conversation.
Exhibition Details
Metaphor of Hands is a contemporary jewellery exhibition and live chiseling demonstration. On show are brooch series and jewellery collections inspired by hand gestures, universal and cross-cultural signs translated into metal through the artist’s refined goldsmithing practice.
