The three Amigos: Robert Baines, Karl Fritsch and Gerd Rothmann

The exhibition of “the three amigos”, representative artists of the modern jewelry art, takes place in Padua from the 15th of March to the 15th of April. 

The project travels to various cities and after stops in Munich, Foiano and Florence, their jewelry pieces are exhibited in the historic Padua building of San Rocco’s oratory which preserves frescoes dating back to the 16th century with scenes from the life of Saint Roch.

Whereas the jewelers are completely different in way and language of expression, they are united by incredible imagination, creative approach and technique.

The exhibition’s title refers to the condition of exile. It is a sense of distance from one’s own homeland, from the dear things and places which can be also the inner feeling, the state of mind. The return from exile implies a decision and determination of dialogue and confrontation.

The three artists, each with own cultural heritage, decided to face together a “discourse” around the adornment, its function and place in the contemporary art.

For more than 30 years, Robert Baines has profoundly shaped Australian jewellery, object-making and international historical scholarship. With wry humour, his works challenge our conception of the world as much as they delight with their technical brilliance. He is renowned for his compelling, enigmatic and intricately constructed jewellery and large-scale sculptural objects. In more recent works, Baines has taken the expression of making intriguing wire jewellery with powdercoated layers of colour — which started in 1994 — to a new level, shaping fine silver into complex, multi-layered arrangements and fragile lace patterns resembling natural and architectural forms.

Karl Fritsch is a German-born, New Zealand based artist renowned for his iconoclastic reinterpretations of jewellery tradition. Working with a childlike playfulness and a rebellious irreverence, he simultaneously embraces and disregards all the historical traditions of his craft, challenges notions of materiality, value and beauty.

German artist Gerd Rothmann is known internationally for his work involving impressions or imprints from human skin translated  directly into the metal. He explores the relationship between the jewelry and the human body. Working with impressions taken from clients and from persons dear to them, he creates unique jewelry pieces to be worn somewhere in the land between decorative ornament and conceptual art. Casts of body parts such as the ears, nose, mouth, nipples, neck, hands and above all fingerprints became his working material and also a documented memory of the action, of the very exact moment.