DesignerDanishb.1937–d.2020
Arje Griegst
1 active items
Arje Griegst was born in 1937 into a family with deep roots in the goldsmith's trade. His father, Baruch Griegst, had come to Denmark from Lithuania around 1900 and worked as a goldsmith and chaser. Arje trained in the same craft, completing his apprenticeship at the Copenhagen jewellers Just Andersen before spending time working with Georg Jensen, then as now the defining address in Danish silver and jewellery. That grounding in technical tradition gave him the freedom, later, to push against it with full knowledge of what he was departing from.
In 1963 he opened his own studio in Copenhagen with his wife, the goldsmith Irene Griegst. At the moment when Danish design culture was firmly committed to functionalism, the clean line, and the subordination of ornament to use, Griegst moved in the opposite direction. His jewelry drew on Greek and Roman mythology, Surrealism, Baroque extravagance, and the natural world - shells, branches, coral forms, the night sky. Large pieces in 18- and 20-karat gold, set with opals, tourmalines, lapis lazuli, and diamonds, were the signature output. Critics sometimes called him the enfant terrible of Danish design. The description stuck, though it obscured the rigour and technical mastery that underpinned work of that scale and ambition.
His most public commission came in 1989 when Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen installed his Konkyliefontaenen (The Conch Fountain): a bronze tree rising from black granite, its trunk twisting upward to support eight large gilded mussel shells. A second version was installed in the Kurashiki Tivoli Park in Japan in 1996. He also designed porcelain for Royal Copenhagen, including the conch shell tableware series from 1978, and created several pieces for the Danish royal family. In 1971 the then Princess Margrethe commissioned a pendant to be made around one of her own tourmalines; the result, Dansk Skov (Danish Forest, 1971-73), is an intricate cire perdue gold tree that remains one of his most discussed works.
Formal recognition came through the Bindesball Medal and a lifetime grant from the Danish National Arts Foundation, among other honours. His work entered the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the National Museum of Stockholm, and the Design Museum Denmark. In 2000, at age 62, he won the Copenhagen Goldsmiths' Guild anonymous competition against much younger entrants - an index of his sustained technical authority.
At Auctionist, 14 lots are recorded across all houses active in the Nordic secondary market. The clear majority - 11 lots - have appeared at Bruun Rasmussen, the Danish house that handles most significant Scandinavian jewellery at auction. The recorded items include paintings and decorative works alongside jewelry, reflecting the breadth of his output across media. The single top sale in the database is modest at 821 SEK, but works of his have achieved DKK 360,000 at international auction, and Bruun Rasmussen has offered individual pieces with estimates running to DKK 100,000, reflecting the genuine depth of collector interest in his major jewelry.