Gerd Rothmann: Werkverzeichnis. Catalog Raisonné 1967 - 2008

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. 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, 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. This lavishly illustrated catalogue of works (1967–2008) is the first complete retrospective of the artist’s work. 

Preface by: Dr Christiane Lange