Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie Masterworks to Be Sold as Jewelry by Gagosian -ARTnews

Cameos by Cindy Sherman and Catherine Opie, produced by LIZWORKS.

ANDREA AGRATI/GAGOSIAN

Gagosian gallery is one of the biggest enterprises of its kind in the world, and it’s known for selling multimillion-dollar works by today’s art stars. Soon, however, the gallery’s shop will begin peddling wearable artworks by two of today’s photographers at much lower prices.

The Gagosian Shop, which hawks books, posters, and ephemera related to artists like Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, and Dieter Roth, among others, has launched a new line of jewelry featuring images based on photographs by Catherine Opie and Cindy Sherman, two of the most important photographers working today. Titled “Cameo,” the project sets portraiture by the artists in cameos made for brooches and signet rings.

Priced between $10,000 to around $35,000, these cameos will be sold at much lower rates than Sherman’s sly self-portraiture and Opie’s images of queer communities. A Sherman cameo, for example, costs millions less than your average Sherman. (Her auction record of $6.7 million, for a work from the “Untitled Film Stills” series that was sold at Christie’s New York in 2014, makes a cameo like this one seem like a steal.)

The pieces were hand-carved in Torre del Greco, Italy, by Gino di Luca, whose family has long produced sought-after cameo jewelry. Cameos are traditionally carved onto rudimentary materials such as seashell, stone, glass, or coral, and have been seen throughout history, dating as far back as third century B.C. Greece.

The jewelry, which was made through jewelry-maker Liz Swig’s business LizWorks, will be sold for a limited time at Gagosian’s New York shop on the Upper East Side starting October 16. Swig told ARTnews over email, “What has been incredible about this project is watching these two contemporary artists, Cindy Sherman and Catherine Opie, move from the world of 2D to 3D.”

She continued, “The project aligns a strong sense of tradition with the present through a unique, artisan sensibility. The beauty of the objects is powerful, but so is the meaning behind this project—a strong respect for both the old and the new.”

Below, a look at some of the cameos that will be on sale at Gagosian’s shop.