Robert Baines as a Modern Classicist. Artist Retrospective at Schmuck 2022

Artist list

Robert Baines

>> Download the complete official Handwerk & Design 2022 Program including the Munich City Map & Metro Plan.


Living Treasure: Master of Australian Craft, goldsmith and emeritus professor at RMIT University, Robert Baines’s multifaceted practice encompasses his work as an artist-goldsmith, scholarship in archaeometallurgy, and ongoing criticism and commentary in the field of contemporary crafts.
His internationally recognised study of archaeological gold jewellery grounds his own craft practice, achieving a sense of continuity with his ancient colleagues and providing a platform to toy with the mythology of our own culture.

Baines has maintained an international profile with exhibitions, awards, lectures and publications for fifty years. In 2019 he celebrates Fifty Years a Goldsmith with a five lecture series in a residency at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Other significant public lectures in the past year have been at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

His works are in prestigious public collections in Musee des Arts Decoratifs,  Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Los Angeles County Museum; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Ville de Cagnes-sur-Mer, France; Legnica Art Gallery, Poland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton; Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

In research areas of artist goldsmithing and archaeometallurgy, he received a Winston Churchill Study grant (1979) and this was followed by a Senior Fulbright (1997), two Senior Andrew Mellon Conservation Fellowships (1999, 2002), and a Sherman Fairchild Research scholarship (2008) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

International and national prizes include Bayerischer Staatpreis gold medal (2005); Friedrich Becker Preis (2008), Herbert Hofmann Preis (2013) an Exempla – Master’s Forum, (2015), and in Australia the richest Craft prize, the Cicely and Colin Rigg Craft Award at the National Gallery of Victoria (1997)and The Seppelt Contemporary Art Award(1998), Sydney.

In 2004 he had an exhibition of his research, Entdecker der antiken Goldschmiedetechnik, at the prestigious Staatliche Antikensammlungen, München, Germany.

Last year he had a significant solo exhibition, Fake News and True Love: Fourteen Stories by Robert Baines, at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), NYC.

Robert Baines is currently touring his exhibition Living Treasure and Fabulous Follies to Mass Art Boston, Arkansas Art Center, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art in Indiana.

Robert Baines holds a Master of Arts in classics and archaeology and His Ph.D. is entitled, The Reconstruction of Historical Jewellery and its Relevance as Contemporary Artefact. His research was to analyse historical jewellery and construct copies based on the known technology of the era. Resultant laboratory constructions with their historical correctness were then available for reworking to convey a contemporary visual relevance and a statement of history.

Significant authored publications comprise Intervention of Red, (Galerie  Biró, Munich,1997); Bloodier than Black AAA.AA….REDEVENT, (Galerie Biró/Helen Drutt: Philadelphia, 2000); Partyline (RMIT Press 2004); Bracelet 'Java-la-Grande’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2006);  More Amazing Schmuck Stories by Robert Baines (Australia Scholarly Publishing 2009); Robert Baines: Metal, (Object Australian Centre for Craft and Design 2010), Fabulous Follies Frauds and Fakes, (Australia Scholarly Publishing 2013).


A selection of his most significant works can also be seen at SCHMUCK 2022.