Petra Class Studio
October – 2025
Aurum
Patina Gallery is honored to present, a luminous new exhibition by master goldsmith Petra Class.
Known for her sculptural use of high-karat gold & rare gemstones, Class unveils a collection that distills light into form.
Born in Germany and based in San Francisco, Class is celebrated for her refined, tactile approach to high-karat gold and gemstones. Her work resides at the intersection of ancient materiality and contemporary design, art jewelry that’s at once clear-eyed and lyrical. Through decades of practice, Class has developed a visual language of line, grid, and color, where composition is guided by structure and the gem’s innate chroma.
Each piece an elemental study in color, structure, and the quiet radiance of metal worked by hand.
Borrowing its name from “aurum,” the Latin word for “gold,” Class explores gold as architecture—planes of high-karat gold fused around gemstones whose hues feel both ancient and immediate: sea-glass aquamarines, electric tourmalines, cobalt lapis, iridescent opals. In Class’s studio, gold is not mere adornment; it is the skeleton and the skin, a living framework that holds light in suspension.
“Gold is a patient metal. It records every gesture. I think of each piece as a ledger of touch, the hammer’s rhythm, the heat’s breath, the small decisions that give a stone room to glow.”
Petra Class
Highlights of the exhibition include new compositions in Class’s beloved “scribble” and “strata” vocabularies: hand‑drawn lines turned into real, three‑dimensional gold forms, alongside bolder, graphic forms that frame gemstones in her organic, sculptural style.
The resulting cadence is unmistakably Class: modern, intelligent, and deeply wearable.
“Petra has a singular way of making gold feel weightless. Her work moves between rigor and poetry, precise and architectural, yet undeniably sensuous. With Aurum, she invites us to see gold as space and silence, as interval and breath.”
Allison Buchsbaum, Patina Gallery co-founder
& curator of the exhibition
Watch the Mindful Meditation with artists THomas Hoadley and Ben Davies
to accompany the exhibition.
Throughout our 25-year story of extraordinary jewels, groundbreaking ingenuity surfaces in the evolving friendship and collaboration from years gone by and in those to come.
For more information on the work, please email: allison@patina-gallery.com
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MAIN IMAGE: Model: Jocelyn Montoya, jewelry by Petra Class Studio.