DIETER ROTH — Art Is Life / Life Is Art: The Graphic Work of Dieter Roth, University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999

Dieter Roth, Art Is Life / Life Is Art: The Graphic Work of Dieter Roth. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 11 September–7 November 1999. Spiral-bound exhibition catalogue; 42 pages, 17 × 21 cm; black-and-white offset printing, printed paper wrappers.

A compact posthumous catalogue published for the University of Iowa Museum of Art’s 1999 survey of Dieter Roth’s graphic work, bringing together prints, drawings, artist books, multiples and related material.

The publication is modest and functional in construction: spiral binding, yellow printed wrappers and a cropped image of a wheeled shelving unit extending across the cover. Inside, reproductions are accompanied by catalogue numbers and captions, with particular attention given to Roth’s books and editioned works.

Roth’s publishing practice was central to his wider work. From the 1950s onward, books became a space in which drawing, typography, photography, found material, repetition and physical alteration could be combined. Publications were frequently revised, republished, incorporated into later works or gathered into larger systems such as his Gesammelte Werke.

This catalogue is especially interesting for the way it records that activity after Roth’s death. Works originally made to circulate as books, multiples and editions are photographed, catalogued and reorganised within a museum publication. The movement is quiet but significant: publication → collected work → exhibition → catalogue.

Rather than simply reproducing individual artworks, Art Is Life / Life Is Art documents a practice in which the book itself was already a working medium. The reproductions of the Gesammelte Werke make this particularly clear: earlier publications appear again as objects within another publication.

For The New Rare, its interest lies partly in that layering. It is both a conventional exhibition catalogue and a record of how an artist’s deliberately fluid publishing practice begins to enter institutional history. A useful and visually distinctive document of Roth’s relationship to books, editions and graphic production.

Condition: Good. Light handling and surface wear to wrappers, with minor edge and corner wear consistent with age. Internally clean from the pages inspected.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.