Dieter Roth: Early Works 1954 - 1965

Rayon Roskar is pleased to host Dieter Roth: Early Works, 1954–1965, a focused exhibition presented by collector, dealer and publisher Matthew Zucker.
The show traces the first transformative decade of Roth's career that begins in Switzerland and continues through Iceland and the United States.

Born in Hannover (1930) and sent to Switzerland as a child refugee during World War II, Roth trained in graphic design in Bern before relocating to Copenhagen and later Iceland, where he married and raised three children.

He remained tied to Switzerland throughout his life, eventually returning to Basel, where he died in 1998. Displacement and reinvention — geographic, formal, and conceptual — became the engine of his work, propelling him through movements as varied as Concrete art, Op art, Fluxus, Pop Art, early conceptualism, and toward the excess-driven practice of his later "quantity over quality" years coming in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The selected works at this exhibition offer a rare opportunity to see the foundations of one of the most restless and influential artistic minds of the postwar period — before fame, before excess, and before the food sculptures for which Roth later became best known.

June 27, 2026 - July 31, 2026
Opening reception: June 27, 2026   5 - 9 pm