Jiro Kamata

Japanese, born 1978

BiographyJiro Kamata was born in Hirosaki, Japan in 1978 to a family that ran a watch and jewelry shop below their home. Kamata was at first resistant to entering the jewelry industry, put off by the conventional designs and glittery ostentation of jewelry in the 1970s and ‘80s. His stance changed, however, when he was a teen and sat down to make his first gold ring at the workbench in his father’s studio. This ring—still treasured in his studio in a velvet box inscribed “Jewelry Kamata”—revealed his talent and sparked his interest in creating jewelry. In 1996, after finishing high school, Kamata enrolled at the Yamanashi Institute of Gemology and Jewelry Art in Kofu, Japan, a goldsmithing program that prepared students for industrial jewelry production. Here, he had the good fortune to have as an instructor Okinaki Kurokawa, who trained as a jeweler in Pforzheim, Germany, the country’s center of jewelry and watchmaking, under the tutelage of renowned jeweler Klaus Ullrich. Kurokawa exposed the burgeoning goldsmith to the world of contemporary, artistic jewelry emanating out of Germany and Europe. On this exposure, Kamata writes: “I was absolutely thrilled. I didn’t know that this kind of jewelry even existed! He told me a lot, and had many books and European catalogs —back then there was no internet, after all.”

Inspired to learn more about contemporary jewelry, Kamata left Japan in 1998 and moved to Pforzheim to study at the Hochschule für Gestalltung (School of Design). A year later, he relocated to Munich to study with Professor Otto Künzli at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where he received his diploma in 2006. That year he was awarded the Hanau City Goldsmith Prize, followed by an invitation in 2008 to complete a residency in Hanau, a German goldsmithing center since the 16th century. This residency proved to be a decisive moment in Kamata’s career, as it was during this time that he first began to incorporate second-hand camera lenses into his jewelry and formulated his first jewelry series with the new material, Momentopia. From 2009 to 2015, he was an Assistant Professor in the department of jewelry at Academy of Fine Arts Munich and won the city’s Förderpreis Award in 2011. Kamata continues to live and base his studio practice in Munich. His work has been collected worldwide, including Australia, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States. A solo exhibition at Ornamentum Gallery in Hudson, NY that recently closed on April 4, 2021.

Select Public Collections:

Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, NY

Corning Museum of Glass, NY

Die Neue Sammlung (The Design Museum), Munich, Germany

Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus, Hanau, Germany

Hiko-Mizuno College of Jewelry, Tokyo, Japan

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum of Arts & Crafts), Hamburg, Germany

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Victoria & Albert Museum, UK

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