Alex Yuvero is made in Madrid. Not manufactured in Madrid, not designed in Madrid and produced elsewhere — made in Madrid, in a studio in the city, by the hands that conceived the pieces. This fact is not incidental. The city is in the work.

Madrid is not a city traditionally associated with fine jewellery in the way that Antwerp is associated with diamonds, or Florence with goldsmithing, or Paris with haute joaillerie. It has no established luxury jewellery quarter, no centuries-old guild traditions in precious metal. This is, in its way, a freedom. There is no orthodoxy to inherit, no established style to work within or against. The work can be what it needs to be.

The City

Madrid is a city of contrasts held together by light. Its architecture ranges from the austere granite of the Escorial tradition to the ornate Bourbon palaces to the mid-century modernism of the Gran Vía. Its art collections — the Prado, the Reina Sofía, the Thyssen — span Velázquez to Picasso to Bacon. It is a city where the ancient and the contemporary coexist without much ceremony, where a medieval church sits beside a bar that opens at midnight, where the light in summer is so specific and so violent that it changes how everything looks.

That light is in the work. The way the Aerolite meteorite surface reads in different light — matte in shade, suddenly alive in direct sun — is a piece behaviour that was noticed first under Madrid light. The way the Möbius links catch and lose the light as they move is a visual property that was tested and refined in a Madrid studio.

On Making in a City

There is a tendency in luxury branding to locate craftsmanship in remote, pastoral settings — the workshop in the mountains, the atelier in the village. Alex Yuvero makes no claim to that kind of isolation. The studio is in a city, surrounded by the noise and friction of urban life. The work happens in that context.

Cities produce a particular kind of attention. They demand that you filter — that you decide, constantly, what matters and what is noise. Good jewellery is the product of that kind of attention applied to objects. What is the essential form of this piece? What is the minimum material required to carry the idea? What survives when everything superfluous is removed?

Madrid is also, increasingly, a city with a serious contemporary design culture. The generation of designers, artists, and makers working in the city now are not working in the shadow of Paris or Milan. They are making work that responds to where they are, using the resources and references that are actually available to them — not the ones that convention says they should be using.

The Studio

The Alex Yuvero studio is not open to the public. It is a working space: tools, materials, pieces in various stages of completion, wax models, mould boxes, the occasional mess of a process that does not always go as planned. The pieces that arrive at your door have passed through this space, been handled and examined and refined in this space, been considered and reconsidered until they were what they needed to be.

If you have a question about the work, about the process, about commissioning a piece — the address is the same as the studio: hello@alexyuvero.com.