24 Facts About Dieter Roth

Dieter Roth was a Swiss artist who gained recognition for his diverse body of work, which included artist's books, editioned prints, sculpture, and creations from found materials, including rotting foodstuffs.

Dieter Roth co-founded the magazine "Spirale" and associated with the Fluxus movement, all the while maintaining his distinct artistic identity.

Dieter Roth was born Karl-Dietrich Roth in Hannover, the first of three sons.

Dieter Roth's mother Vera was German; his father Karl-Ulrich was a Swiss businessman.

The family moved to Bern in 1947, where Dieter Roth began an apprenticeship in commercial art.

Dieter Roth's clientele includes the local milk association and the cheese union.

Dieter Roth left home in 1953, and began to collaborate with Marcel Wyss and Eugen Gomringer on the magazine Spirale, of which nine issues would be published.

Dieter Roth took part in a number of local exhibitions, as well as writing poetry, making his first organic sculptures and experimenting with Op art.

Whilst Dieter Roth was close friends with many members of early Fluxus, the avant-garde art movement centred around George Maciunas in New York City, he deliberately kept his distance from Maciunas; when asked to add his memories of Maciunas to a biography being compiled by Emmett Williams, he contributed a less-than-complimentary summary; he later told an interviewer;.

Dieter Roth contributed to V TRe, the Fluxus magazine originally edited by George Brecht, and had work published in An Anthology, published by La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low and Maciunas in 1963.

Dieter Roth had offered his artist's book Literaturwurst to Fluxus as a possible publisher in 1963, around the same time as the early Fluxkits but this was turned down by Maciunas.

In 1964, Dieter Roth was commissioned, alongside several other artists, to paint a portrait of the collector and dealer Carl Laszlo to celebrate his fortieth birthday.

Dieter Roth wanted to make something three-dimensional instead, and was promptly fired.

Dieter Roth managed to salvage his position and used the next three months to create 6,000 pieces on paper, photographed, printed, re-photographed, drawn over etc.

Dieter Roth then held a party inviting the students to remove anything they liked; the college rescinded its offer to publish the book, which ended up as Snow, finally printed in 1970.

Dieter Roth moved on to Rhode Island School of Design at the beginning of 1965, where his tenure involved teaching at the School of Graphic Design, employing his principle of "non-teaching as teaching".

Dieter Roth used these students to typeset and print his first book of poetry Scheisse.

Since the students were unable to speak German, Dieter Roth incorporated all their typographical errors into the book.

Dieter Roth had started to compulsively paint over postcards in the early sixties, explaining that it was easier to paint over printed objects than blank canvases; one of his most famous works, 96 Piccadillies, 1977, grew out of this compulsion, having as its starting point Dieter Roth's encounter with the collection of postcards of Piccadilly Circus owned by Richard Hamilton and his wife Rita Donagh.

Dieter Roth's installations became larger over the years, and more open-ended.

Dieter Roth's work became increasingly celebrated by the 1980s; a number of retrospectives began to be staged throughout Europe, as well as large scale exhibitions of new work.

Dieter Roth represented Switzerland at the 1982 Venice Biennale, and received a number of awards and prizes, including the Genevan Prix Caran d'Ache Beaux Arts, a prestigious Swiss prize, in 1991.

Dieter Roth died on 5 June 1998, in his studio in Basel, of a heart attack, and was buried at Arnarstapi on Snaefellsnes, Iceland.

The Dieter Roth Academy was founded in May 2000 by fifteen close friends and colleagues of Dieter Roth.