Seminar on the exhibition PRESSED SQUASHED SQUEEZED Dieter Roth Material and Printmaking at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Falckenberg Collection (03.12.2022-19.03.2023)

curated by Dr Dirk Dobke and Dr Ina Jessen

Co-operation partners:

University of Hamburg, Department of Art History; University of Applied Sciences, Printing Workshops

Content Framework

Press, squash, squeeze! These are all terms used by Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth (1930-1998) to describe his particular passion for working with printmaking. This part of his oeuvre is the focus of the exhibition PRESSED SQUASHED SQUEEZED Dieter Roth Material and Printmaking, which is being organised as a collaboration between the Deichtorhallen / Falckenberg Collection (Hamburg) and the Dieter Roth Museum (Hamburg).
Dieter Roth’s graphic work is unique in art history in its artistic and technical diversity, its sheer quantitative mass and its implicit joy of expression. Roth’s virtuosity and use of all traditional printmaking techniques, as well as his questioning of normative structures by crossing material boundaries, are just some of the facets of his extensive oeuvre of prints from the 1940s until Roth’s death in 1998. Based on his training as a commercial graphic artist and framed by the various places where he lived and worked, as well as his proximity to artistic collaborators, Roth’s extensive oeuvre is presented in the exhibition in chronological order. The approximately 1,100 exhibits from the collection of the Dieter Roth Museum are organised and presented according to specific themes, motifs and materials.

Practical orientation

In addition to the creative and content-related level, artistic processes are also based on technical procedures, forms of presentation and reproduction. These relate to the work of the artist, the printing process, the presentation in museums and collections, and the publishing sector. In this context, the art historical treatment of print products requires knowledge of historical contexts, technical processes as well as institutional and professional manners.
The seminar will focus on Dieter Roth’s graphic works in an art historical context, as well as his artistic and practical production processes. In addition to the art-historical and thus theoretically grounded generation of knowledge, the course also explicitly examines Roth’s work in a practice-oriented way. In order to promote a well-founded approach and the learning of appropriate handling, the basic printing processes (relief printing, intaglio printing, planographic printing, serigraphy) will be demonstrated in the practical part of the seminar and actively learned and applied by the students. This provides an insight into the printmaking process from the printing plate to the finished graphic. This practical insight is provided to the students in cooperation with the printmaking laboratories of the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg).

As part of the exhibition PRESSED SQUASHED SQUEEZED Dieter Roth Material and Printmaking, the theoretical and practical knowledge gained will also be made available to interested visitors in the form of object-related text contributions to the exhibition. These will be published as part of the supplementary exhibition catalogue and/or as accompanying material to the exhibition. The students will thus be the patrons of a print, a series, a section of the exhibition and a printmaking technique. In order to place the texts fruitfully in the context of the exhibition, they must be edited and ready for publication by the opening of the exhibition. According to the planned opening, the seminar will take place in the summer semester of 2021.