Dieter Roth. Hat. 1965. Screenprint over offset. Publisher and printer: the artist, New Haven. Edition: approx. 20 unique variants. The Museum of Modern Art. The Print Associates Fund, 2009. © 2010 Estate of Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth was a singularly important figure in postwar European art—an iconoclast, really—whose wide-ranging practice, including artist’s books, prints, drawings, sculpture, assemblages, sound recordings, film, music, and poetry, reverberated for decades to come. He was associated with kinetic art, Fluxus, Conceptual art, and concrete poetry, often blurring the boundaries between mediums and movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
As a printmaker, he totally pushed the envelope. He sent slices of greasy sausage and cheese through the printing press, stuck strips of licorice onto etchings, glued croissants onto the covers of the books he designed. He also worked with more traditional techniques like screenprint and etching, sometimes combining them to play with different experimental effects.