“Joies d’Artistes-Homenatge a Elsa Peretti” (Artist’s Jewelry – Tribute to Elsa Peretti) was an exhibition organised in honor of Elsa Peretti at Fundació J. Llorens Artigas, Gallifa, Barcelona in 2023. The Artigas Foundation was created in 1989 in memory of the famous Catalan ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas by his son, the ceramist, draughtsman and engraver Joan Gardy Artigas. Its mission is to preserve the memory of Josep Llorens Artigas’s work and to foster arts, culture and educational initiatives in Catalonia.

The Artigas family are among the greatest ceramists of the 20th century. They worked with many significant artists including Braque, Picasso, Chagall, Giacometti and especially Miró, with whom they had their most fruitful collaboration, realising all his ceramic works and some bronze sculptures. The Artigas family also had a strong friendship with Elsa Peretti. They first met in the late 1960s, while part of the “Gauche Divine” intellectual movement along with Oriol Maspons, Ricardo Bofill, Óscar Tusquets and Serena Vergano.

Over the years, artists Joan Gardy Artigas, Mako Artigas, and their son, Isao Artigas (the Foundation director and curator of the exhibition) remained close to Elsa Peretti. They shared a passion and commitment to the arts, promoting, through their respective foundations, the work of talented Catalan contemporary artists, and championing the applied arts as an art form. The Artigas and Elsa Peretti also championed each other. Throughout her life, Elsa Peretti collected many ceramics, paintings and sculptures by Joan Gardy Artigas, and Artigas purchased many of Elsa Peretti’s designs. The exhibition “Joies d’Artistes-Homenatge a Elsa Peretti” attested to this mutual admiration by displaying the Artigas’ private collection of Elsa Peretti’s jewellery designs for Tiffany & Co., alongside portraits of Elsa Peretti by the photographers Colita, Eric Boman and Hilda Moray, as well as jewellery designs from Catalan and international artists close to Elsa Peretti or linked to the Artigas.