‘I love natural materials. But everything man makes is nature, even plastic, even the atomic bomb,’ Meret Oppenheim observed in an interview with Valie Export in 1975. The sugar ring, which Meret Oppenheim designed in the mid-1930s, is an absurd and delightful combination of artifice and so-called nature, of opulent and cheap materials. The throwaway and frangible sugar cube is elevated to the status of a lasting, precious stone; an edible material is made wearable. At any time the wearer can exchange the cube for a fresh ‘jewel’.
Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) was an artist like no other. She found early fame with the Surrealists, but she would transcend that group to become one of the most important Swiss cultural figures of the 20th century…
