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Niklas Link Characters

The portraits - pieces of jewellery - of Niklas Link have their origin in the abstraction of his own self-portrait. In them the mystery of a mask is combined with the irony of caricature or with symbolic expressiveness.

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In art, the self-portrait enables the artist to present his technical skills in unity with the representation of his person. In the field of artistic jewellery design, the self-portrait is a rather rare motif. But in the work of Niklas Link it becomes the starting point for his fascinating "characters".

His objects are based on his own image, which he sees as a mirror of his perception of the world and its influence on himself. In constructive processes of alienation and abstraction, he develops images with universal expressiveness out of it. The face serves him as a place of transformation, with which a different character appears. Based on his sketches, Niklas Link uses a micro-welding machine to construct hollow steel bodies to which he adds plastic elements. Often these additions are mass products that take on an unexpected, expressive quality in the new context. With the use of zirconium dioxide - industrially produced diamonds - as well as blackened and coloured surfaces, he sets allegorical accents which he wants to be understood as a reference to the transience and variability of living beings. "As these age, so do my characters age. By wearing them they live and get traces. With the formation of an individual patina, each character develops differently".

Niklas Link completed his professional training in Pforzheim and then studied metal design at the University of Hildesheim, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 2016 under Professor Georg Dobler and Karin Seufert.