DIETER ROTH: ISLANDSCAPES
Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘Islandscapes’, an exhibition by Dieter Roth (b. 1930 Hanover, Germany – d. 1998 Basel, Switzerland). Featuring a selection of graphic works, monoprints, multiples and unique pieces spanning from the early 1960s to 1975, this exhibition, titled ‘Islandscapes,’ focuses on Roth’s printmaking, which accompanied every phase of his life and practice.
February 25 – April 19, 2025
Roth produced his first etchings on tin sheet metal at age 16 in St. Gallen, Switzerland. He would go on to master traditional printmaking techniques, including intaglio, woodcut, offset and screen-printing, via a roundabout education that included an apprenticeship to prominent Swiss graphic designer Friedrich Wüthrich, as well as lessons in lithography and typography with artist Eugen Jordi.
Centering works in the landscape genre, ‘Islandscapes’ highlights Roth’s heterogeneous techniques, the radicality of his approach and the key aesthetic principles he explored through printmaking, such as repetition, doubling, symmetry and inversion. Never one to consider printmaking a minor art form, Roth tested the concept of reproducibility—not only with his prints but with his sculptures and installations—deconstructing the ideal of a fine artwork as a discrete and original aesthetic object.
The vast panoramas of Iceland, with its striking topographic contrasts, figure decisively in the works which comprise ‘Islandscapes,’ revealing the deep psychological impact of Roth’s move to Reykjavik in 1957, as well as his lifelong engagement with the island country thereafter. Popular images of Iceland co-opted from postcards (which Roth termed ‘Melancholic Knicknacks’) served as the starting point for several of the bodies of work in this exhibition. Some, shown here, are constructed from a basic act of assemblage. By cutting two copies of the same postcard along their horizontal axes, rotating one half 180 degrees, and taping either two top- or two bottom-halves together, Roth produced uncanny symmetries and inversions, simulating the effect of an island, city or skyline reflected in an undisturbed body of water.
As a lecturer in printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in the mid-1960s, Roth famously began to implement perishable materials—including chocolate, cheese, butter, mayonnaise and yogurt— in conventional printmaking processes. The effects of time on Roth’s mutable materials are exceedingly visible in ‘Am Meer (By the sea)’ (1970–1974), a phalanx of 54 wood-and-paper flags planted in individual cones of molded sugar. Having reached various stages of disintegration, the sculptures resemble islands conquered by an anonymous empire that is fated, like all matter, for a fleeting existence.