Ring with Silver Wave and Onyx Bars

This ring belongs to the body of work that established Antonio Pineda as one of the defining modernists of mid-century Taxco silver, a maker who treated jewelry as small-scale sculpture rather than ornament. Its inclusion in Gobi Stromberg's Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda (2008, p. 151, plate 201) places it within the documented core of his designs.

The composition sets three vertical emerald-cut onyx bars perpendicular to the band, flanked on either side by wave-patterned silver. The black stone reads as a series of architectural verticals against the fluid silver, an interplay of rigid geometry and movement that is characteristic of Pineda's approach to form. The result is closer to a built structure than a conventional gem setting.

Pineda worked in Taxco from the 1950s onward, building a workshop whose output carried the silver tradition founded there into a confident modernist idiom. He favored bold silhouettes and the pairing of sterling with semiprecious stone, and this ring shows that vocabulary at the scale of the hand.

Carrying the Antonio crown hallmark and recorded in the standard reference on his work, the ring is a representative example of his sculptural rings and comes to market only occasionally.