Dieter Roth

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.

In both ‘Surtsey’ (1973/1974) and ‘SURTSEY – Dinner’ (1973-1993/2003) Roth iterated on a clichéd photograph of the titular island, which was taken as it was being formed 30 kilometres off Iceland’s coastline by an undersea eruption. Roth’s conflation of two key motifs in these series—a volcanic phenomenon and a steaming serving platter—reflects his profound interest in dynamic and volatile substances, and in change as a necessary precondition for creativity in general. Like many of Roth’s artworks, the real island of Surtsey began to erode as soon as it came into view. Having emerged in 1963 in an explosion of fire and steam, it’s estimated that the island will vanish beneath the ocean’s surface by 2100.

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.

This personal account from Sigríður Björnsdóttir—shared with the artist she describes as the love of her life—details her collaborative work with Dieter Roth, their encounters with friends and artistic peers and the beginnings of Roth’s multifaceted practice.