Dieter Roth & Arnulf Rainer – Collaborations

Provocation – collaboration: a number of wild anecdotes surround the collaboration between these two exceptional artists, begun in 1974, in the course of which close to 500 works were produced, most of which bear no direct relation to individual works by Dieter Roth or Arnulf Rainer. Rather, both artists were intent on letting their individual conceptions collide unchecked, in order to bring forth works of slapstick performativity and a pictorial wit fed by humour. Often the smaller, slighter Arnulf Rainer approached the taller, more corpulent Dieter Roth as a provocative whisperer, and Roth would then at times respond to Rainer’s pictorial ideas and promptings with targeted acts of aggression. Photographs accompanied these encounters. Rainer would then work on the photographs and pass them on to Roth, who completed the work. Beyond a number of „Fuzzle Pieces“, the present volume assembles above all large-format drawings and the finest examples of the collaborative works in drawing and printmaking labelled „Misch- u. Trennkunst“, into which Björn Roth was also admitted from the 1980s onwards.

Exhibition:
Hauser & Wirth, London, 14/3 – 3/5/2014