My Favourite Pieces: Dirk Schrijvers’ shot in the arm for young jewellers

Dirk Schrijvers considers his career as a medical oncologist and his collecting as two aspects of the same concept. “I was always interested in becoming a doctor,” he says. “We were told that you had to help your fellow men. But I was also interested in art from a very young age, and I also bought art to help the artists.”

His interest in contemporary jewellery began after he moved from Limburg province in Belgium to study in Antwerp in the 1980s. Hospital dress codes at that time required him to wear a tie. “When I had to examine the patients, the tie flipped over the patient and it was not really hygienic,” says Schrijvers, who specialises in head and neck, and genitourinary cancer. His fix was a tie pin from the Antwerp-based goldsmith Nadine Wijnants.

Also a collector of art, design and studio glass, Schrijvers started following the work of jewellery students graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. If he liked a piece, he would buy it, or he would commission a ring set with blue stones (his preferred colour).

Since then, his interest has moved from fine jewellery to more sculptural pieces, with a particular focus on brooches. Yet, while he used his tie pins until hygiene rules changed and required him to “skip jewellery” altogether, he does not wear his 300 pieces. Instead he collects “mostly to support the young people” and displays their work at home in presentation boxes. “The first thing a piece has to do is to touch me, to move me,” he says. “And then that can be that it’s very nice to look at . . . [or] that it has a message.”

Nadine Wijnants, Color Rings series (2010)

Two hundred pieces from Schrijvers’ collection are on display in Pinned! Contemporary Antwerp Jewellery, a show at the city’s DIVA museum until June 1. They include a series of four rings he commissioned from Wijnants.

Each ring represents a different season and is inspired by the colour in a phrase written by Schrijvers. After Wijnants produced a “classical” white gold and blue diamond ring for summer, he told her to “go wild” on the rest as he would not wear them. “They don’t look like rings — they are little sculptures,” he says. His favourite, the autumn piece made from yellow gold and citrine, responds to his words, “The colour of the sun and the sand, and the one that makes my life shine yellow”. Schrijvers says the form is “like a spiral that refers to eternity”.

Dimitar Stankov, brooch (2013)

Schrijvers first met Stankov at an exhibition for students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where the Bulgarian jewellery designer used vibrations from traditional Bulgarian music to move corn starch into forms. He used this research to inform his wire Bagpipes & Memories pieces, including Schrijvers’ silver and gold brooch. The doctor says the “emotional” piece incorporates gold belonging to Stankov’s family.

Schrijvers has continued to follow Stankov’s career, but is not always taken by his designs. “The series after this one, he put lamb tripe on the pieces,” he says, adding that they were “too smelly”.

Warre Woutermaertens, brooch (2025)

Schrijvers commissioned this brooch from Woutermaertens, a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, after admiring his larger artworks made from wood, concrete and steel, which he manipulates to represent decay. The brooch uses the same materials. “His art is at the moment of big importance because we are all looking at the changing world, where decay is becoming more and more [prevalent],” says Schrijvers.

Joani Groenewald, brooch (2023)

Contemporary jewellery in Antwerp has become “more critical and socially engaged” during his time collecting, says Schrijvers. Newer additions to his collection tend to carry a message. Groenewald is a South African jewellery designer whose work he discovered at an exhibition in Antwerp. This brooch is part of her [Un]connected series that explores segregation, the demarcation of land and territorialisation. The resin piece resembles a link in a metal chain, which Schrijvers says is a symbol of segregation and demarcation, but can also mean a “coming together”, reflecting what he says is Groenewald’s philosophy of “connection and unconnectedness”.

Peter Vermandere, “Mirror-headed curly crawler” brooch (2014)

The first brooch Schrijvers bought in the 1980s was by Vermandere and he has tried to buy from each of the designer’s subsequent exhibitions. “He is one of [my] favourites because his jewellery is always very baroque, so it’s very excessive,” says Schrijvers. “It’s always not too much, but almost too much . . . so it’s never a simple piece.”

He likes the combination of materials — matt silver, shiny hematite and gold — in this piece, part of Vermandere’s Stone I Am Series 2. Schrijvers says he and Vermandere “grow together”, as the designer develops his “crazy ideas” and his own collecting evolves. It is the “thrill of looking” for a jewel that drives Schrijvers. “When I have the piece, something gets loose,” he says, adding that the stress and excitement of the chase fades away.