Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light

Daniel Brush and his Scholar's Table piece © Nathan Crooker

Daniel Brush was a solitary master of metals, whose work blurred the boundary between sculpture and jewelry.

Renowned for his painstaking, entirely hand-crafted approach, he transformed gold, silver, and precious stones into intimate, meditative objects. This June, L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts, will present Daniel Brush, l’art de la ligne et de la lumière, an exhibition of over seventy-five jewels, sculptures, and paintings — many leaving his Manhattan loft for the first time since his death in 2022.

In June, L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts in Paris will present more than seventy-five of his works by Daniel Brush — jewels, sculptures, paintings — many of them leaving his Manhattan loft for the first time since his death in 2022.

Born in Cleveland in 1947, Brush studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology and taught art philosophy at Georgetown before relocating to New York in 1978. There, in a loft filled with antique machines and shared with his wife and collaborator Olivia, he spent decades working alone treating metal the way a painter treats a canvas: as a surface to be manipulated, coaxed, transformed.

Brush made jewelry that didn’t announce itself. His steel cuffs curve with structural clarity, appearing almost weightless despite their heft. His necklaces often take broad, sculptural forms that wrap around the wearer like organic armor or a halo, combining fluidity with precise, geometric rigor to create pieces that are both wearable and profoundly artistic. When gemstones appear, they're integrated into the composition, punctuation rather than exclamation.

His paintings and sculptures carry the same rigor. A steel form tilts just enough to animate the light around it. A canvas reveals delicate grooves — evidence of the hand that made it. What connects them all is an obsession with how line defines space and how light moves across a surface.

At L'ÉCOLE, the exhibition will make those connections visible. Jewels will sit alongside drawings and large-scale sculptures, revealing Brush as an artist who worked across disciplines without ever abandoning his core concerns. It's a rare opportunity to see the full scope of his vision — not as a jeweller who dabbled in art, or an artist who occasionally made jewels, but as someone who refused the distinction entirely.