"Dieter Roth. Pressed pressed squeezed"

With his multifaceted and interdisciplinary oeuvre, Dieter Roth is regarded as one of the great universal artists of the 20th century. Born in Hanover in 1930, the son of a Swiss father and a German father lived alternately in Basel and Iceland, painting, drawing, writing, filming, collecting and creating installations of immeasurable density.
Material and print graphics
The Bündner Kunstmuseum is dedicating an exhibition to Dieter Roth, which gives a rare overview of his escalating prints on the basis of representative groups of works. Based on his early work on concrete art and poetry, Roth succeeded in liberating himself in Providence, USA. From then on, the artist experimented with food as a material, breaking with all formal expectations and thus setting in motion a development that is still considered groundbreaking today. Subsequently, the artist created a graphic work of enormous stylistic diversity. Printed products incorporating sausage and cheese, iconographic screen prints after postcards or late rather picturesque still lifes testify to his immense creative power. The pivotal point remained the topic of self-reflection, which presented itself over all phases sometimes humorous, sometimes self-critical, sometimes laconic. His engagement with language, to which he remained faithful throughout his life, resulted in works that have not lost their provocative content to the present day. The exhibition, which comprises around 200 graphic works, enables a unique deepening of Roth's experimental conception of his work in the focus of the key works and is flanked by selected artist's books, with which he also broke new ground.

The exhibition, conceived by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg together with the Dieter Roth Foundation, can be seen in an adapted form at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur and brings together material and printed works from all creative periods in the most extensive Dieter Roth exhibition for over 20 years.