The Ultimate Marketplace; The World of Wearable Art
By Margery Stein:
Margery Stein is an editor for The Business World magazine of the New York Times
Published: November 12, 1989

No New York gallery currently represents the work of Deborah Aguado, a Manhattan-based metalsmith, but her reputation draws clients to her West Side studio. There, Ms. Aguado creates the haunting metal constructions that embody her ideas about illusion, perspective and the spatial effects of light. In this world of mirrors, a pin may start life as a striped square of metal, then gradate into a gold triangle and wind up as a small silver slab; or graduated linear planes may suggest railroad tracks that seem to advance or recede into infinity.

A signal feature of her pins, necklaces and bracelets, which range from $200 to $10,000 and more, is their use of the free-cut stones of Bernd Munsteiner of Germany – tourmalines, amethysts and other gemstones with perhaps a dozen differently shaped sides. In Ms. Aguado’s most recent design, an 85-carat golden beryl is set smack in the middle of a circle of articulated silver hinges.

”Sometimes I work and don’t care if it sells,” says the artist. ”Risky as it is, that’s how I work best.’