Fresh off the theme of yesterday’s Whitney Biennial article, in which contemporary visual artists tried their hand at t-shirt design, let’s take a look at another example of an artist (an architect, in this case), justly famous in his own medium, testing a new mode of expression.

Frank Gehry’s buildings are widely known and celebrated worldwide, with his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain taking a large piece of the credit for that city’s newly achieved prominence on the world stage (photo courtesty kurtxio).

Although designing a line of jewelry for famous NY-based jewelers Tiffany & Co. might seem odd at first, the pairing turned out a success. Gehry often designs the preliminary ideas for his buildings in messy, rough sketches, eventually transformed into buildable models by his staff (with his input throughout), and the process was likely similar for the jewelry.

His buildings are already complex, curving, shiny, unpredictable structures, and his jewelry doesn’t disappoint here. While I can’t claim to be an informed critic on modern jewellery design, several of Gehry’s concepts appeal in the same strange way his buildings do. Tiffany describes most of his pieces as containing an “inner energy”, and while it’s hard to apply that description to all of them, the label certainly fits when Gehry’s jewelry is contrasted with what you’d normally find in a Tiffany’s store.

Have a particularly noteworthy example of an artist successfully branching out to a new visual medium? Share it!