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24/5/2006

Diether Roth e Martin Kippenberger

Hauser & Wirth, London

Coppermill

Hauser & Wirth are delighted to present the inaugural exhibition at Coppermill, the gallery’s new East End space. The exhibition will display works by Martin Kippenberger and Dieter Roth. Kippenberger and Roth are considered to be two of the most influential artists of recent decades. Both produced prolific bodies of work that reflect a common interest in unconventional media, techniques and subject matter, harnessing everyday objects, language and imagery. Collage and assemblege are central to both artists' practice, as are collaboration and studio practice. Though Roth was from an older generation, his working methods were similar to those of Kippenberger, both artists displaying a shared fascination with deconstruction and failure as means of creating art. This exhibition will explore the similarities and differences between these two great figures, and will be the first exhibition in the UK to focus on Kippenberger and Roth.

The works of Dieter Roth defy the boundaries of medium. His oeuvre includes experimental books and prints, as well as painting, collage, sculpture and works that combine all of these in large scale multimedia assemblages. In these, Roth explored the messy processes of art making and integrated into his work the unpredictable element of change and decay. He employed ephemeral materials that were subject to decomposition, and created large scale installations that were moulded and changed over time. His work Grobe Tischruine (Large Table Ruin) - a mixed media installation that incorporates tables and other objects from the artist’s Stuttgart studio - was begun in around 1974, though remained a work in progress for two decades, modified and extended at each subsequent exhibition until it reached over twelve metres in length. By presenting the site and tools of artistic creation as a work in its own right, Roth raised questions as to the criteria of art and the nature of artistic expression.

Martin Kippenberger’s career was similarly prolific and varied. He produced paintings, objects, sculptures and installations as well as books and posters. Kippenberger constantly reinvented his art and his artistic persona, drawing on popular culture, politics, history, literature and autobiography. He countered high art with anecdote and satirical one liners, employing anachronistic references and strategic malapropism. His working practices systematically challenged issues of authenticity and originality through appropriation, collaboration and delegation. For the 1981 exhibition Lieber Maler Male Mir, he hired a Berlin sign-painter to produce selected images, and frequently delegated the physical production of works to his throng of studio assistants. Kippenberger produced several major series of paintings, comprising as many as twenty-one panels that bear individual titles as well as a group one. They function almost as exhibitions in themselves, presenting a cacophany of styles and allusions that compete for attention.

Dieter Roth (born Hannover 1930) trained initially as a graphic artist, though he began to make experimental works in various media in 1954. He lived in Copenhagen between 1955 and 1957, before moving to Reykjavik, Iceland, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1958. In 1960, Roth received a William and Noma Copley Foundation Award. He lived in the USA from 1964-67, teaching at Yale. In 1968-71, he held a Professorship at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s his reputation grew, with exhibitions internationally, including in Dusseldorf in 1973; Barcelona in 1977; and Chicago in 1984. He began to make a systematic inventory of his works on filing cards. In 1986, Roth won the Charles Nypels Prize, in 1989 the Lichtwark Prize of the City of Hamburg, and in 1991 the Prix Caran d’Ache Beaux-Arts, Geneva. In 1990, he established the Dieter Roth Foundation in Hamburg. He was working to consolidate its archives when he died in Basle in 1998. Roth was the subject of a major posthumous retrospective at Schaulager Basel, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Museum of Modern Art and PS1, New York in 2004.

Martin Kippenberger (born Dortmund 1953) studied at the Hamburg Art Academy from 1972, quitting after 16 semesters. He begun painting whilst in Florence in 1976, producing an ambitious though incomplete series of paintings. He spent the following years in a number of cities, including Hamburg, Berlin and Paris. His first large scale museum exhibition was held at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, in 1986. This was followed quickly by exhibitions in Cologne, Vienna and New York. During the 1990s, Kippenberger taught at the University of Kassel, and also at Yale University, in Nice and Amsterdam. Shortly after the opening of his retrospective exhibition at the Muse'e d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Kippenberger died in Vienna on 7 March 1997. The recent retrospective at Tate Modern is the first major museum retrospective of Kippenberger’s work in Britain.

Private View: May 25, 6 - 9 pm

Hauser & Wirth
196A Piccadilly - London
Hours: Thursday to Sunday 12 - 7 pm

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