Dieter Roth

Dieter Roth


Dieter Roth is a really interesting artist to study and he helped me start my project and get some ideas.
Roth is a German-Swiss artist who lived between 1920 and 1998. Throughout his career his work varied massively but he worked with obsessive energy and used sculpture/installations/assemblages and books to create interesting and unique pieces of art. Much of Roth's art revolves around the theme of recordings and diaries. He likes his art to reflect his life and he works with his own possessions to create his pieces. Many of his exhibitions act as interesting insights into his personal life. His diaries served as a variety of different things. Within his diaries he had 'to do' lists and agendas. His ideas and thoughts were scribbled down and he revisited what he had written many times. Roth acted as an artists who wrote down any idea he had and he wrote it down on whatever was available to him. In one of his exhibitions some Tablemats are displayed where we can see he has written down his urgent thoughts and ideas. Roth worked with collections of items. He liked to archive various things from his life, such as unwanted items and discarded things. He collected receipts, wrappers and magazine pages. All his art was concerned with a theme of autobiographical analysis.

One of the most interesting things Roth did was filming himself. In his late life Roth was close to death as he was a heavy drinker and had a poor diet, in order to monitor himself he decided to set up cameras all around his house.  The art was displayed on a group of monitors stacked on top of each other, darkness encroaches on the screen nearing the end this symbolises the death of Roth making the piece of art extremely poignant. Whilst Roth was ill he lost a huge amount of weight making his old clothes unwearable, he created an art piece with his old clothes. The clothes appear in a piece called 'Clothes Picture' . The clothes act as a piece of self portraiture.

Throughout Roth's life he created many incredibly interesting pieces. The way in which he used diaries to create art is what initially drew me to look at him as an artist in greater depth. Although much of his work is interesting to look at I decided to focus on the way in which he reworked his diaries and studied them and made art using them. This is something I experimented with as time went on.