From Six Piccadillies, 1969/70

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.