Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth (1930-1998), born in Hanover, Germany, lived and worked between Switzerland, Iceland and Germany. One of the most experimental and influential artists of the postwar period, he worked across printmaking, artist’s books, painting, sculpture, installation, film, music and literature. Closely associated with Fluxus and Neo-Dada, Roth developed an open-ended practice that deliberately blurred the boundaries between art and everyday life.
Roth is particularly known for his unconventional use of everyday and perishable materials, including food, waste and found objects. His artist’s books and editions became central to his practice, combining texts, images and experimental printing processes, while works incorporating organic materials introduced decay and transformation as integral elements of the artwork. Through his playful and often provocative approach, Roth challenged conventional ideas of artistic authorship, permanence and the boundaries between different artistic media.
Dieter Roth
From Six Piccadillies
1969/70
Double-sided screenprint over offset lithograph, 50 x 70 cm. Edition of 150, signed and numbered.
Dieter Roth’s edition series 6 Piccadillies (1970) is based on a postcard of Piccadilly Circus given to Roth by Rita Donagh, the wife of his longtime friend and collaborator Richard Hamilton. Roth enlarged and reproduced the postcard image and transformed it through a series of radical interventions. In this version, the original cityscape is almost entirely obscured, leaving three bright green double-decker buses isolated against a dark ground.
The work emerged from Roth’s close artistic relationship with Richard Hamilton and his fascination with the postcard as a popular form of mass-produced imagery. The original postcard came from the collection of Hamilton and his wife, Rita Donagh, who gave it to Roth in the late 1960s. Hamilton himself collected postcards extensively and used them as source material for his own work, and his visual language of sharply defined forms, bold colour and the transformation of everyday imagery is strongly echoed in 6 Piccadillies. By reducing the familiar urban scene to a few isolated elements and transforming the original image through intense colour and graphic intervention, Roth turns an everyday postcard into an enigmatic, almost abstract composition.
The complete set of six works is part of the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
EUR 3,500
