Dieter Roth

Life and work

Dieter Roth was born in Hannover in 1930, the eldest of three sons of a German mother and a Swiss father. During the war he was sent to Switzerland by a charity that placed Swiss German children away from the fighting, and the exile became permanent; he lodged in Zurich with a household shared by artists and actors who encouraged him to paint and to write poetry. His family joined him only afterwards, destitute, and settled in Bern, where he took an apprenticeship in commercial art and drew for the local milk and cheese associations. Seeing an exhibition of Paul Klee gave him what he later called a shock that grew into an obsession, and he moved steadily away from the commercial trade toward international modernism. He worked thereafter between Iceland, Germany, Switzerland and the United States, and he died in his studio in Basel in 1998.

The artist's books

Roth left home to collaborate with Marcel Wyss and Eugen Gomringer on the magazine Spirale, and after marrying an Icelandic student and moving to Reykjavik he began the sequence of books that made his reputation. In Bok he cut holes through the pages and abandoned the bound sequence, so that a reader could rearrange them at will. For Daily Mirror Book he cut a newspaper into small squares and rebound them into a volume of some hundred and fifty pages. Literaturwurst, the literature sausage, ground printed matter with spices and forced it into a sausage skin; the first was posted to his friend Daniel Spoerri. The critic Johanna Drucker observed that there would be no way to translate a Roth book into another medium, because the idea of the work is inseparable from its form as a book.

Decay and the multiples

Asked to portray a collector for a birthday, Roth painted over a solarised photograph with processed cheese, the first of the biodegradable works. In the Insel series he arranged foodstuffs as islands on a blue panel, covered them in yoghurt and then in plaster, and let each piece pass through mould, bacterial decay and insect attack until only what could not rot was left. The editioned multiples that followed used equally unorthodox materials: an edition of cakes handed out at an opening and eaten by the guests, chocolate, birdseed, banana and rabbit droppings. He was close to many of the early Fluxus artists while keeping a pointed distance from the group's organisers.

Prints, installation and late renown

Printmaking ran through all of it. The lithograph Double Quartet, a sheet of crossing lines and bright colour in which the silhouettes of instruments, pegs and strings read as a kind of notation, belongs to the Tate collection in London. Roth painted compulsively over postcards, finding printed paper easier to work on than a blank sheet, and the Piccadilly series grew out of that habit. His installations became larger and more open ended over the years, often made together with his son Bjorn; Garden Sculpture began as a single bust on a bird table and ended as a room filling accumulation decades later. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and was widely retrospected in Europe in his last years.

The market

Roth reaches auction mainly as books, prints and multiples rather than as paintings. At Bonhams in London in 2022 a signed mixed media work on card, numbered from an edition of twenty five, sold for GBP 6,120 including premium. At Bonhams in San Francisco in 2011 the colour screenprint View of The Emme, from an edition of sixty published by Gallery Toni Gerber in Bern, sold for US$2,318 including premium. The house has sold an impression of Double Quartet, which ran well past its upper estimate.