mosaic mixed-metal wall plaque

A wall plaque in mixed metals, brass, copper, and silver, inlaid with hardstone mosaic, takes Sigi Pineda's work off the body entirely and onto the wall, an abstract modernist composition built from contrasting metals and colored stone. The format, often signed "Sigi" in a corner, is one of his most distinctive and recurs across his output.

Sigi's grounding was in the Taxco school's leading workshops. Morrill records that he was among the silversmiths in Margot van Voorhies Carr's atelier, where he oversaw the enamelers for four years before opening his own shop in the mid-1950s (Morrill, p. 168). The mixed-metal mosaic plaque belongs to the independent, experimental work that followed.

The form shows him reaching beyond jewelry into decorative objects, combining metals and stone mosaic into wall-mounted composition. Morrill notes that Sigi later developed a die-cast line to make his jewelry less expensive to manufacture (p. 250), but the mosaic plaques are handworked assemblages of a different character.

For a collector, a Sigi mosaic plaque is the artist at his most adventurous, working abstraction in metal and stone for the wall rather than the wrist.