About
Jewellery Designer / Silversmith / Founder of GONE ARCHIVE
Kraków, Poland
BIO
Michal Danny Nowak is a Kraków-based jewellery designer, silversmith and founder of GONE ARCHIVE, an independent jewellery atelier established in Poland.
Working primarily with sterling silver and gold, he creates jewellery and small-scale objects through hand fabrication, casting, forging and experimental surface treatments. His practice moves between jewellery, sculpture, architecture and material research.
PRACTICE
Michal Danny Nowak has been working with jewellery for over twelve years. His practice is rooted in traditional goldsmithing, developed through years of hands-on work and apprenticeship in the workshop of Jacek Kwiatkowski, one of Kraków’s most accomplished goldsmiths and one of the most respected masters of the Kraków goldsmithing tradition.
Nowak spent several years learning and working in Kwiatkowski’s workshop before his mentor’s death. The experience became one of the foundations of his practice, shaping his understanding of materials, craftsmanship, proportion and the discipline of making.
His work combines traditional goldsmithing, lost-wax techniques with experimental surface treatments, industrial references and sculptural forms. Working primarily with precious metals, he approaches jewellery not simply as an accessory, but as an object with its own material and architectural presence.
His work explores the tension between contemporary, experimental forms and the discipline of ideal proportions, precision and refined surfaces. Rather than embracing the deliberately casual and nonchalant approach prevalent in contemporary jewellery, Nowak seeks a tension between experimentation and formal perfection — between the unexpected and the precisely resolved.
Much of his practice can be understood as a tribute to what he inherited through his apprenticeship with Kwiatkowski: a knowledge of making, an understanding of materials and a respect for craftsmanship. A selection of Jacek Kwiatkowski’s notable works can be seen in the GONE ARCHIVE atelier in Kraków, where they remain a tangible part of the legacy that continues to inform Nowak’s practice.
PRIMITIVE FUTURISM
Primitive Futurism describes the intersection between archaic forms and imagined futures. Michał Danny Nowak has made Primitive Futurism a defining language of his jewellery practice, developing it into a distinct and recognisable approach to contemporary jewellery.
Through his work, Primitive Futurism combines references to archaeological artefacts, brutalist architecture, industrial construction, geological erosion and speculative design. Rather than appearing as a passing aesthetic reference, it has become a consistent and central framework through which Nowak designs jewellery and objects.
Rather than imagining the future through technological perfection and polished surfaces, Primitive Futurism treats future objects as if they were already archaeological artefacts. The result is jewellery that can appear simultaneously ancient and futuristic: constructed yet eroded, primitive yet technological, functional yet ambiguous.
Within GONE ARCHIVE, Primitive Futurism is the primary conceptual language through which Nowak approaches jewellery — defining its forms, materials, surfaces and relationship to time.
GONE ARCHIVE
GONE ARCHIVE is an independent, one-man creative atelier founded, owned and operated by Michał Danny Nowak in Kraków, Poland.
At its core is jewellery, while the wider work extends into photography, film, video, visual language and creative direction. These disciplines allow Nowak to shape not only the objects themselves, but also the imagery, atmosphere and context surrounding them.
GONE ARCHIVE brings object making, image making and creative direction together under a single authorship. The result is a coherent visual and material world in which the jewellery, its representation and the environment around it are treated as parts of the same work.
GONE ARCHIVE is the platform through which Nowak develops and connects these different forms of creative work.
COLLABORATIONS
Enfin Levé × GONE
GONE has collaborated with the independent fashion label Enfin Levé, with jewellery and hardware produced by the Cracow's artist. The 2026 T-Rex Leather™ project incorporated handmade sterling-silver hardware designed by Michał Danny Nowak, including a cold-forged element inspired by the DNA double helix and a lost-wax-cast buckle set with natural black diamonds with signature GONE's form and texture.
KAROL KARYS
Karol Karys and Michał Danny Nowak have maintained a long-standing friendship and creative collaboration, working together for years on one-of-one objects.
Their collaborations are developed as highly limited, unexpected releases rather than regular collections. One-of-one pieces created by Karys and Nowak appear without advance announcement on the GONE ARCHIVE online store, often disappearing within minutes.
The knives combine Karys’ functional craftsmanship with precious and unexpected details. Each piece incorporates elements such as diamonds, gemstones, gold or silver, turning a functional object into a collectible one-of-one piece.
Two of their most recent knives, each priced at over €3500, sold out in less than 20 minutes after appearing on gone-archive.com.
The collaboration reflects a shared interest in craftsmanship, unconventional materials, functional objects and the meeting point between design and collectible art.
Karol Karys — madebykarys.com
A LIGHT LOST
A LIGHT LOST was founded in 2025 by Michał Danny Nowak and Maciej Wojdyła as an independent design studio exploring brutalist movement, materiality and contemporary object making.
The project began with jewellery as its first medium, using wearable objects as a starting point for translating the language of brutalist architecture into physical form. Its approach is rooted in monumental structures, raw construction, geometry, mass and structural expression.
Jewellery is treated as the beginning rather than the destination. A LIGHT LOST is intended to develop beyond wearable objects into a broader field of design, objects, imagery and other forms of material and visual experimentation.
One of its first projects, the FHORU-Ring, translates the façade of Kraków’s Hotel Forum — the brutalist megastructure designed by Janusz Ingarden — into an oxidised-silver object.
A LIGHT LOST approaches brutalism not as a decorative aesthetic, but as a way of thinking about form, structure, material and scale.
PRESS
Esquire Hong Kong
Madame Figaro Hong Kong
Menlogic
NM+ / New Monday
WOWwatchers
Giquello / Drouot
Domus IT
well.pl
CONTACT
WORKSHOP ADDRESS:
Gromadzka 46a / PLAYHAUS
30-719 Krakow
Poland