Georg Jensen Reissues 11 Midcentury Archive Pieces by Female Artist-Makers in Paris

At Matter and Shape in Paris, Georg Jensen did something quietly radical: it looked backward to surface names that history has a habit of overlooking. The Copenhagen house presented "The Collector," an 11-piece reissue of midcentury jewellery drawn from its Copenhagen archive, with creative director Paula Gerbase placing the work of Danish and Swedish female artist-makers at the center of the project.

The presentation took place within the Tuileries Gardens, where Matter and Shape 2026 occupied two pavilions. The fair has made a practice of placing industrial manufacturers alongside independent designers who oversee every stage of their own production, and Georg Jensen occupied an instructive position between those two poles: a storied design house with institutional resources, using those resources to recover and amplify craft work by women whose contributions to midcentury Scandinavian jewelry have rarely received sustained commercial attention.

The specific names of the 11 maker-artists whose work appears in "The Collector" have not yet been publicly detailed in full, nor have the individual piece titles, original creation dates, or materials. What is known is that Gerbase directed the archival selection with an explicit curatorial focus, foregrounding the female authorship embedded within Georg Jensen's own Copenhagen holdings. Whether the reissues are faithful reproductions or reinterpretations informed by the originals remains to be confirmed by the house.

The fair itself offered a useful frame for reading the gesture. Georg Jensen shared the Tuileries pavilions with Herzog and de Meuron, which presented its "Hong Kong" stool in a bespoke walnut and ash wood mix produced specifically for the occasion, and with up-and-coming French designer Sophie Taillet, whose spinning-top mirrors were positioned at the entrance to one of the pavilions. Together, the three exhibitors illustrated the fair's own argument: that scale, whether of production or ambition, is never simply a matter of physical dimension.

For Georg Jensen, "The Collector" represents a particular kind of institutional self-examination, one that asks whose work was preserved in the archive and whose work deserves to be seen again.