In the late 1960s, Rita Donagh, wife of Roth’s longtime friend and collaborator Richard Hamilton, gave the artist a postcard of London’s famous Piccadilly Circus. This unremarkable image is the basis for one of the artist’s best-known series of artworks, 6 Piccadillies. Roth enlarged and reproduced the image as a doublesided photolithograph, then transformed it through various interventions: overprinting it in Day-Glo colors, sub-merging it in a fog of translucent white, and almost completely erasing it with a layer of iron filings. The portfolio cover resembles a suitcase, an item that had a constant presence in Roth’s itinerant life. 96 Piccadillies, a later volume, reproduces the artist’s paintings on postcards picturing the same landmark; the reproductions themselves can be separated and sent as postcards.
Gallery label from Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, February 17–June 24, 2013.
