Dei Gratia Paperweight

Through his art, Magnus Gjoen teases the fine line between life and death, love and hate, and beauty and destruction, to create an unsettling yet sumptuous aesthetic.

Dei Gratia is an open edition paperweight. The beautifully-crafted ornament allows the artist to dive into another theme that his work revisits – the fragility of life and objects.

The piece depicts the human skull, decorated with scenes from Renaissance art. It serves as a twenty-first century memento mori: an age-old artistic tradition of depicting skulls and skeletons to symbolise human mortality.