This publishing project, which the German artist began in 1969 together with the publisher and printer Hänsjorg Mayer, brought together the artist’s books that he had produced manually and which, until then, had very short print runs, while at the same time allowing him to project a collection of 40-volume books that, in addition, include the particularity that they were not published in an orderly manner, explains the museum in a statement.
The project, which is on display until September 25, shows, in the IVAM Library room, a total of 21 of these volumes, together with several other publications that distill some of the author’s own characteristics, such as photocopied material, homemade bindings and poetic motifs that link the binomial art-life and expand it until it becomes an entity of its own.
Dieter Roth’s production was characterized by its diversity: until his death in 1998 he produced books, graphic works, paintings, drawings, sculptures, ‘assemblages’ and installations, but he was also a musical composer, poet and writer.
Art and life – those responsible for the exhibition emphasize – “were inseparable in his career and his daily experiences became the object of inspiration for most of his works”.
The collection of ‘Collected Works’ is understood as the ‘catalogue reasoned’ of an artist difficult to define who decided to write his career with the same freedom with which he produced unclassifiable works or included degradable organic materials in his books, they conclude.
–
