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The Dieter Roth museum

dieter roth - museum In the early 70s Dieter Roth (1930-1998) with support from his Hamburg collector began to establish a private museum and archive of his work. The museum and archive are now run by the Dieter Roth Foundation. It was during his lifetime that Dieter Roth was able to establish both institutions and they are to be seen as a result of a friendship between artist and collector which lasted for almost 30 years. The museum is solely devoted to showing the work of Dieter Roth. The artist himself chose not only the individual pieces on show to represent each of his creative phases but also their individual mode of presentation. In addition to presenting his selected works on four floors the museum also houses the almost complete collection of his prints as well as a wide variety of preparatory sketches and his entire production of artist´s books. Furthermore the collection consists of various pieces of jewellery he designed, exhibition posters and other design projects.

Besides the changing places he inhabited in Iceland, Switzerland and Germany, Dieter Roth in the early 70s started to use a studio in what is now the museum building which was offered to him then by his collector. From here Roth started over many years to amass and shape his work into a collection according to his own ideas. The Foundation now sees its task in keeping and extending the collection as well as the archive. Part of the collection was the “Schimmelmuseum” (mould museum). Work on this installation took up most of the 1990s until his sudden death in 1998. Due to its dilapidated state the mould museum had to be closed and demolished in the winter of 2003.