 Dieter Roth Prints and Books 1958 - 1995 Dieter Roth's oeuvre is an expansive and elusively rich universe that has taken shape in a wide variety of media, spanning everything from drawings to series of sketches, prints, print portfolios and books, from individual objects to films and collages, from painting to installation, also including musical objects, performance and a significant body of poetic works. To Roth, experimental and expansive work in various media and with differing materials was a constant challenge. Having pronounced his ironical dictum in the early 1960s that there should be "quantity, not quality", he placed the programmatic deconstruction of the hierarchies of artistic production at the centre of his artistic approach. If we want to assess the place of Roth's graphic work in relation to the rest of his oeuvre, it becomes immediately apparent from the sheer quantitative scale of his production – whether books, book objects, prints or what he called "flat objects" – that what we are dealing with here is an essential core of his art. Roth's exploration of his expanded conception of printing is more than a preoccupation with a particular discipline. It becomes, similarly as in Warhol, a programmatic imperative, an aesthetic guideline along which he carried out the essential artistic steps of the work process to make them fully explicit. Thus, samples of his printed work certainly allow conclusions to be drawn that are valid for the structure of his entire oeuvre. From screen-print, engraving, lithograph and offset print to photo and digital copy print – in the masterly, purposeful technical command of printing techniques, Dieter Roth had few equals. If a given printing medium had not existed, he would have invented it. Like the other parts of his work, his printed work presents a multi-layered richness of experimental and interdisciplinary discoveries, comprising as it does an important number of individual sheets, theme-related series, editions and portfolios. One of the defining characteristics of these works is their processuality. As the prints were constantly altered and improved, there is rarely a sheet in an edition that looks exactly like another. Roth kept plumbing the limits to the technical possibilities of printing, while at the same time he made creative use of them, thus sparking a dialogue full of tension. His experimental approach to printing techniques finally, from around the 1960s onwards, led him to use organic materials. In these sheets produced with the greatest technical precision and ingenuity, Roth circumscribes in continual variation the developments and pictorial solutions that are also evident in his book production. Essentially, Dieter Roth's structural thinking again and again culminates in the bound collection of accumulated materials, the hybrid form between book, print, painting, object and sculpture which was his own creation and with which he set new standards in artist's books, that medium so fetishised and so strategically employed by the avant-garde. Having become more and more independent of the institutional mechanisms of the art world by acting as his own publisher, Roth used his books as a privileged means to formulate and develop central ideas and conceive prototypes that an-nounce formal and thematic shifts in his work. In this context, the medium of the diary as a container for memories provides a forum to the process of subjectivi-sation that, especially since his participation in the 1982 Biennale of Venice, increasingly places the person of the artist at the centre of his work. Even more than the previous decades' pictorial objects, these works are based on the es-sential parameters that fundamentally shape Roth's work: intermediality, variability, deconstruction and finally the exposure of the artist's self, which was to become ever more important, being put into practice in ever more uncompromising ways. (Felicitas Thun) 24 May - 26 July 2003 Hours: Tue-Fri 12 am - 6 pm, Sat 11 am - 4 pm Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber Löwenbräum-Areal Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zürich Telefon: 01 446 80 60 Fax: 01 446 80 65 E-Mail: info@ghwp.ch www.ghwp.ch |
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