Sculptor, painter, printmaker, collagist, poet, diarist, graphic designer, publisher, filmmaker and musician, German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth has been described as ‘a performance artist in all the mediums he touched’. Everything Roth made involved acting out a central concept of art and life as utterly indivisible—a single enterprise in which material stuff is subservient to the emotional and sensual experience for which it stands. Roth was not an artist who tolerated boundaries. In seeking to pulverize them, he elevated the processes by which things happen, embracing accidents, mutations, and accretions of detail over time—inviting nature to have its way with unstable mediums, including fruit, chocolate, and sugar, and perhaps most boldly, inviting the dilution of his own authorship through constant, intensive collaboration with other artists. Those partners included such significant figures as Richard Hamilton, Emmett Williams, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch. But it was Roth’s long and symbiotic collaboration with his own son, artist Björn Roth, that stands as testament to the enormous and enduring potency of his restless, relentless process.

Dieter Roth’s work has been the subject of a number of exhibitions and retrospectives worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg, Austria, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland, Museum of Modern Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, New York, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, France, among many others. In 1982 Roth represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale, and received a number of awards throughout his life including the prestigious Swiss prize, Caran d’Ache Beaux Arts in 1991. Since his death in 1998, a foundation and museum dedicated to his work, The Dieter Roth Foundation and Museum, was established in Hamburg, Germany. 

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth