Hauser & Wirth Presents Dieter Roth Björn Roth, January 23

Hauser & Wirth presents Dieter Roth Björn Roth in New York, 18th Street, 23 January - 13 April 2013.

Opening: Wednesday 23 January 6 - 8 pm

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, collagist, poet, diarist, graphic designer, publisher, filmmaker and musician, German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930 - 1998) has been described as 'a performance artist in all the mediums he touched'. Everything Roth made involved acting out a central concept of art and life as utterly indivisible - a single enterprise in which material stuff is subservient to the emotional and sensual experience for which it stands. Roth was not an artist who tolerated boundaries. In seeking to pulverize them, he elevated the processes by which things happen, embracing accidents, mutations, and accretions of detail over time; inviting nature to have its way with unstable mediums, including fruit, chocolate, and sugar; and perhaps most boldly, inviting the dilution of his own authorship through constant, intensive collaboration with other artists. Those partners included such significant figures as Richard Hamilton, Emmett Williams, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch. But it was Roth's long and symbiotic collaboration with his own son, artist Björn Roth, that stands as testament to the enormous and enduring potency of his restless, relentless process.

On 23 January 2013, Hauser & Wirth New York will open 'Dieter Roth. Björn Roth', a landmark exhibition of masterworks that highlights this remarkable twenty-year collaboration and, through it, the diversity of the practice that has established Dieter Roth as one of the most inventive and influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. 'Dieter Roth. Björn Roth' culminates Hauser & Wirth's 20th anniversary and inaugurates the opening of the gallery's new, second exhibition space in New York City, at 511 West 18th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Moreover, the exhibition sets the stage for major exhibitions to be presented at 18th Street in 2013 by three artists - Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn and Matthew Day Jackson - who claim Roth as their touchstone.

Organized with the cooperation of the Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg, Germany, 'Dieter Roth. Björn Roth' presents more than 100 objects created since the 1970s, including numerous works never before exhibited in the United States. Among these will be 'The Floor I (Studio-floor from Mosfellsbaer, Iceland)' from 1973 to 1992; a series of wall-mounted works form the 1980s comprised of such at-hand materials as toys, sweets, tools, refuse, and dead insects in plastic tubes; and key works from the 'Tischtücher' series of paintings made in the late 1980s and early 1990s from used tablecloths. Key examples of Dieter Roth's poignant 'Kleiderbilder' paintings, made from the artist's own clothes, also will be on view, as will the installation 'Grosse Tischruine (Large Table Ruin)', created by Dieter and Björn Roth with Eggert Einarsson between 1978 and 1998.