Spend some time with a hundred or so pieces of Michael Zobel’s jewelry from the last forty years and it is easy to imagine that Zobel must be one of the happiest extroverts to make a career as a jewelry artist. His necklaces, rings, bracelets, brooches, earrings—even his cufflinks—are dramatic, glamorous and frequently over-the-top in outsized bravura. He makes cuff bracelets that are seven or eight inches long. They could be decorative armor for Amazon queens or evening bijoux for women with a flair for the theatrical. And if you have never seen a 261-carat gemstone set into a piece of jewelry, then you have not experienced Zobel at his most exuberant. He is a jewelrymaker who can take a Ural emerald the size of a squashed lime and set it into a bracelet as gracefully as if he were setting a seed pearl. A German jewelrymaker with an international reputation, Zobel is now an elder statesman of the sleek, modernist European aesthetic that for the last half of the twentieth century was especially well expressed by German, Central European and Scandinavian artists. Though Zobel is far more flamboyant than most, he nevertheless embraces the basic European modernist notion that jewelry is the nexus where a love of materials—including unusual ones—meets forward-looking design. Excellent craftsmanship is part of the formula, and a masterful skill with tools and techniques is expected. Zobel is certainly a master craftsman. The pieces recently exhibited in the Michael Zobel forty-year retrospective at Aaron Faber Gallery in New York City could be used as an educational exhibit for aspiring goldsmiths.

Zobel long ago figured out how to make precious metals behave the way he wants them to. One of his signature techniques is to use platinum and pure gold to create patterns on twenty-one karat rose gold. He is also known for patterning twenty-four karat gold onto oxidized sterling silver for a gold-on-black-and-silver effect. The sheer spectrum of colors and finishes Zobel achieves on his metals is remarkable, from speckled pink rose gold to charcoal colored oxidized silver and gleaming gold.

Also arresting is Zobel’s love of unusual and imperfectly cut gemstones. He likes rough, unpolished diamonds, South Sea pearls, amber, moonstone, carnelian, fire opals, and unfamiliar semiprecious stones such as chrysoprase—an apple green stone. Another of Zobel’s favorite stones is rubelite, a hot pink variety of tourmaline. Then there are the big, flattened turquoise and coral beads that he used for a time in simple but oversized bead necklaces. In the same way that Zobel’s metals create a rainbow of metallic colors, his use of a wide variety of stones also makes it obvious that he is a metalsmith with a taste for brilliant color.

The earliest pieces in the exhibition are from the late 1960s, just after Zobel opened his own atelier in Germany. Born in Morocco in 1942, Zobel grew up in Barcelona, then apprenticed in Germany and worked in France before earning a degree from the School for Design in Pforzheim. Of all the pieces in the show, these late 1960s and early 1970s pieces are the only ones that reveal their age. One cuff is a spidery web of gold filament anchored at the front of the wrist by a 261-carat Ural emerald. Zobel made the bracelet for his wife, but it could just as easily have snaked around the arm of a rock ’n roll queen of the era. It is witchy and daring yet still glamorous.

Pieces from more recent decades are harder to pinpoint chronologically. In the early 1980s the work had a looser, slightly more organic look than it does now. And in the 1980s he seemed to enjoy making opera-length, dangling earrings, which had the look of exquisitely colored waterfalls of metals. But in general, Zobel seems to have settled on his signature sculptural aesthetic sometime in the 1980s and since then he has remained true to it. His work through the decades is sleek, refined and, with few exceptions, devoid of any narrative. There is no personal message or political commentary in Zobel’s work. His motivation, it appears, is simply to make beautiful objects.

Yet it is a sign of Zobel’s enthusiastic spirit that he is not above diving into narrative work if the situation calls for it. On display is a gorgeous pendant and earring set from his Queen of the Night Series, which Zobel made for a celebration of the two hundred anniversary of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Made of silver, gold, lapis lazuli, and pearls, the jewelry is deep blue and white, with the outlines of a woman’s eyes peering from the neckpiece like a tigress in the night looking for prey. The Queen of the Night set manages to conjure images of sorcery and fantasy with a splash of jazz age hedonism tossed in for good measure. It says much about Zobel’s talent that even with this set of themed jewelry, his consummate craftsmanship and playful sensibility work together to make the earrings and neckpiece extraordinary.