Roth-Time: The Dieter Roth Retrospective in the
Schaulager, Basel
The unconventional
Schaulager, designed by the architects
Herzog & de Meuron, reveals the scale of a new kind of institution
which has been expanding and affecting Basel’s cultural life since May.
Once each year, the Schaulager will be introducing the various aspects of
its activities to the public in an exhibition. This begins with a
retrospective of the works of Dieter Roth, which opened on May 24 and can
be seen through September 14, 2003.
Schaulager Münchenstein/Basel
Herzog & de Meuron, Architects
Photo: Adrian Fritschi, Zürich
“Roth Time. A Dieter Roth Retrospective” is the first large,
comprehensive exhibition to follow the artist’s death in 1998. The
Schaulager in Basel will be introducing Dieter Roth’s work with well over
500 loans from 55 collections and spanning fifty years. One of the donors
to the exhibition is the Deutsche Bank Collection. In the Schaulager, it
will be possible to experience the variety of Roth’s work as a brilliant
and exciting overall concept for the first time. For db-art.info, a close
friend of Dieter Roth’s recorded her impressions of the opening and
exhibition: between 1967 and 1974, a love affair connected Dieter Roth and
the American artist
Dorothy Iannone that endured as a friendship up until Roth’s death (an
article on the couple’s correspondence can be found
here). “Dieter Roth is present here,” Dorothy Iannone wrote in her essay
for the retrospective, which is also a declaration of love, both to her
friend and his work.
Schaulager Münchenstein/Basel
Herzog & de Meuron, Architects
Photo: Adrian Fritschi, Zürich
The
King is dead, long live his work!
Dorothy Iannone on the
Dieter Roth Retrospective in Basel
The long awaited definitive
retrospective of the mighty and majestic Dieter Roth has opened in Basel.
The exhibition is overwhelming in its beauty and in its diversity. Dieter
Roth was a master of everything he touched. It is astonishing in how many
different manifestations of his vision he excelled. His inventiveness is
unparalleled. After having seen just the first half of the exhibition, I
was already filled with a feeling of exaltation which only an encounter
with the very greatest of artists can produce.
Dieter Roth, Motorradrennfahrer III,
1970/1994 (Reconstruction) Dieter Roth
Foundation, Hamburg
Photo: Heini Schneebli, Hamburg
|
In the sensational Schaulager, the new institution designed
by
Herzog and de Meuron, and commissioned by Maja Oeri, more than five
hundred works of Dieter Roth from a 50-year period of creation have been
brought together in a comprehensive exhibition curated by Theodora
Vischer. The works exhibited include drawings, graphics, books, paintings,
objects, installations, and video and audio works. We have never before
experienced – not to this tremendous extent – the totality of Dieter
Roth's creation. And it may be a long time before this many of his works
are assembled in one place again.
Schaulager Münchenstein/Basel
Herzog & de Meuron, Architects
Photo: Adrian Fritschi, Zürich
In 1997,
a year before his death, Dieter Roth invited me to participate in his
exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille. Writing about
my work in the catalogue he said: "The better the (artistic) work of your
lover is, the better you can love him/her, and the better you have a
chance to grow (as an artist). Good work of a lover makes good talk for
his/her lover." No one ever had better work to write about than this
writer at this moment. An universal artist does not come along that often
in our lifetimes.
|
Dieter Roth,
Portrait of the Artist
as Vogelfutterbüste, 1968
Photo: Martin Bühler,
Öffentliche
Kunstsammlung Basel
|
The reception for the lenders took place one brilliant,
sunny Saturday morning. The public opening was scheduled for the early
evening and after that, a dinner for the friends at the
Kunsthalle Restaurant which, along with
Donati's, was Dieter's favorite restaurant in Basel. Old friends and
colleagues from all over Europe and America arrived to celebrate the man
whom it had been in
Richard Hamilton' s words, "a privilege to have known". I had not slept
much in anticipation of the great event. I was aware this would be a kind
of farewell to Dieter. Up to this time, Dieters great exhibitions had been
installed by himself. In Marseille, he even became a part of the
exhibition himself when he set up a desk and a working space in the middle
of the show and very often sat there, preparing the second volume of the
catalogue. Now, shaping the whole experience would not be done by the
artist anymore.After this retrospective, in a certain sense, Dieter Roth
would belong – and rightly – to the world.
Dieter Roth, Flacher Abfall, 1975-76/1992
Flick Collection
Photo: A.
Burger, Zürich
[1]
[2]
|
