Return from Exile is the title of the traveling exhibition project created by Gerd Rothman, Robert Baines and Karl Fritsch. The three goldsmith artists, respectively of German, Australian and New Zealand nationality, after the exhibition at Kunstfoyer in Munich and Spazio per l'arte contemporanea Oratorio di San Rocco in Padua, presented their works in the spaces of Galleria Antonella Villanova.
Each with their own cultural heritage confronted the other around the theme of exile.
Exile is the condition of those who leave their homeland, it is a condition of the human soul: feeling exiled.
Returning from exile involves a choice, a decision, often the return takes place in a land that is hostile and yet it is in that seemingly difficult territory that one chooses to confront, the return is a courageous challenge.
The territory to return to for the three goldsmith artists is one in which they discuss around another possibility of conceiving ornament, in which they construct a new identity that passes through a reflection on representing oneself.
The works, or rather the “small sculptures” that are the object of their making, are jewelry in the most traditional sense of the term : they adorn, embellish and at the same time pose questions, bring experiences that are revealed on the body that becomes an exhibition space, impose new gestures sometimes provocatively uncomfortable.
Rothman, Baines and Fritsch's return from exile is return from the condition of foreignness and loneliness that sometimes characterizes the artists' abode; it is return to dialogue, confrontation and the research of a space in which cultural diversity, the different approach to making, its modalities, technique and materials are accepted, understood and not felt as a threat but as an enrichment, as a forward shift in our representing ourselves to show ourselves to the world.