Gerd Rothmann

Bio

Gerd Rothmann (b. 1941 in Frankfurt/Main) began his training as a gold- and silversmith at the Staatliche Zeichenakademie in Hanau after an apprenticeship as a toolmaker. There followed a working sojourn in Lapland in 1964. He worked as an assistant in the studio of Hermann Jünger in 1966, and from 1968 on in his own workshop. Between 1981 and 1994, Rothmann had visiting professorships at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung in Pforzheim, the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Vienna, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and the Royal College of Art in London.

As an artist, Gerd Rothmann is concerned with the human body. He has been investigating it and experimenting with it for more than thirty years: the fruits of his labours are finger and foot casts. Jewellery must, if it is actually to be worn, observe specific conventions. Here the possibilities of creating something very particular, personal, incomparable are, therefore, limited to a certain extent.
Gerd Rothmann introduced body casts in the medium of jewellery early on in his career by clothing finger casts in objectively abstract smooth forms or recasting moulds of some parts of the body as small sculptures. In doing so, Gerd Rothmann creates objects that, on the one hand, are the most intimate adornment of a particular body, that is, jewellery in its most beautiful, direct form, and, on the other, can be viewed as free-standing sculptural figurations.
The upshot is artworks that are entirely individualised. What might be taken for granted (for example, fingerprints) is defamiliarised and reproduced as abstract and ornamental. Cold precious metals seem to have been bent into human shapes because they have been “touched” by body heat. The contrast is stirring to see. Rothmann represents a stringently radical interpretation of jewellery, which is always commensurate with wearability and the highest quality. Gerd Rothmann’s work is known worldwide and pieces of his are owned by the most important collections in Germany and abroad.