Pressetext aus: ARTnews, April 2004
Reviews International, von David Galloway

DIETER ROTH
Heinz Holtmann and Museum Ludwig
Cologne

With a sweeping retrospektive titled „Roth Time“, staged by the Ludwig Museum, and a bravura survey of the artist’s multimedia achievements at the Galerie Heinz Holtmann, Cologne paid a three-month homage to the Swiss-German quick-change artist Dieter Roth. The Ludwig show was a reprise of the retrospective of 500 works (the first since the artist’s death, in 1998) curated by Theodora Vischer, director of Basel’s recently opend Schaulager Museum. In a modified and slightly abbreviated form, it moved on to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where it is on view through june 7.
Born in Hannover in 1930, Roth often seemed to be following in the footsteps os another of that city’s native sons, Kurt Schwitters. Yet Roth, often lovingly described as a berseker, managed to out-Dada Dada and resist all attempts at being labeled.
There was scarcely a creative medium he did not explore. He was (often simultaneously) a fabric designer, poet, filmmaker, painter, musican, dancer, sculptor, publisher, goldsnith, engraver, actor, teacher, and photographer. Above all, he was a tireless communicator, an ageless enfant terrible, and a merciless agent provocateur.
Roth was notorious for his use of bizarre materials, including beer bottles, chocolate bunnies, plastic bags, spice, and banana peels. His first “material pictures” and accumulations date from 1965, when he taught commercial art at the Rhode Island School of Design. (All but one of those works disappeared when his apartment in Providence was forcibly emptied because of unpaid rent.) Included in the Ludwig show were several chocolate sculptures and a painting rendered in Gorgonzola.
If the Ludwig show captured the epic sweep of Roth’s vision the 88 works at Heinz Holtmann documented the artist’s amazing intensity. With books, drawings, paintings, graphics, and objects dating from 1954 to 1996, the Holtmann show distilled the fierce energy that was the berserker’s unmistakable and mesmerizing trademark.

David Galloway, in: ARTnews, April 2004