Gelman’s Chess
A masterpiece chess set series created by Alexander Gelman
New York/Tokyo 2010
World-renowned media artist Alexander Gelman, whose work resides in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Cooper-Hewitt in New York, The Smithsonian Institution, and Bibliothèque National de France in Paris, has created a collection of masterpiece chess sets in collaboration with traditional Japanese craftsman using centuries-old lacquerware and porcelain techniques.
Chess
Chess is a board game played between two players. It is played on a chessboard, which is a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. At the start, each player controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king, whereby the king is under immediate attack (in “check”) and there is no way to remove or defend it from attack on the next move.