Summer in St. Moritz: Roth Bar to return alongside a presentation of Anna Maria Maiolino

Since its first iteration, the bar has gradually evolved, as for each exhibition site-specific materials have been incorporated into the installation. ‘Roth Bar’ (2004 – 2015) was first unveiled in the exhibition ‘Dieter Roth: Lest / Train’ at Reykjavik Art Museum in 2005 before continuing to London (2006), Milan (2013), Zurich and Basel (2015/2019). It was last shown from July 2022 until September 2023 at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz.

The story of ‘Roth Bar’ at Hauser & Wirth began when Dieter Roth insisted that a bar form part of his first show with the gallery in 1997. Along with his son Björn, Dieter Roth installed the functional ‘Bar 2’ (1983 – 1997) in Zurich and every beer bottle served became a part of the bar installation and visitors’ conversations were recorded and archived. The bar, comprised of scavenged materials, embodies a central motif found throughout Dieter Roth’s work.

On the second floor we will present a selection of fourteen artworks across painting and sculpture by internationally acclaimed artist Anna Maria Maiolino. Born 1942 in Italy and one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today, Maiolino works across a wide range of disciplines and mediums, including drawing, printmaking, poetry, film, performance, installation and sculpture. Within her practice, Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self. Through fragmentation and abstraction, her surfaces are rich with metaphor, alluding to and questioning language, sexuality, desire and the unconscious.

Maiolino was recently honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024, titled ‘Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque’ – a testament to her extraordinary contribution to the art world. Maiolino is participating in the Biennale for the first time this year, presenting a new large-scale work that continues and unfolds her series of sculptures and installations in clay, on view through 24 November 2024.

The presentation will include three of Maiolino’s metal sculptures from her 2016 series Hilomorfos (Hylomporhs), named after hylomorphism, the Greek philosophical doctrine that physical beings result from the combination of matter and form. In her series Ações Matéricas (Material Actions), Maiolino’s mark-making is based on a meditative approach in which she allows gravity to determine the composition.

Other works on display deal with the dichotomy between full and empty spaces, as explored in the series A Sombra do Outro (Shadow of the Other) (2014), cubes of cement replete with voids, where the artist uses clay molds with forms that appear as hollow spaces once carefully removed from the dried cement. Voids are a recurring motif in the artist’s work, evoking a sense of loss and dislocation. Maiolino also pursues this motif with the steel series Escarificações (Scarifications) (2018), using a laser cut to investigate the contrast between positive and negative, present and absent, inside and outside.

Above all, Maiolino’s is a work of liberation: abstraction is freed from the more repressed and puritanical precepts of Minimalism and brought back into the service of the active, desiring body.