Renowned multimedia artist Dieter Roth’s preferred form, and the one he spent his lifetime pursuing, was the Gesamtkunstwerk, a German term for “total work of art.” Working across a diverse range of media, disciplines, and creative activities, Roth developed an artistic practice that dissolved the boundaries between art and life, upending traditional categories, hierarchies, and even timeworn notions of singular authorship. Often collaborating with other artists, including his son Björn, Roth produced an ever-expanding body of work that gestured toward the cumulative effects of a life spent making and remaking.

The sculpture Balabild 5 (c. 1975–2005), made in collaboration with Björn Roth, is a complex portrait of their shared creative life, expressed through an array of artifacts that passed through their family art studio in Iceland. Made of materials including wooden flooring from the original studio, canvas, paint and paint tubes, brushes, lightbulbs, photographs, and other found items, Balabild 5 was developed over decades and is intended to look forever unfinished, as if the artists have frozen the energy of their studio and could step in at any moment to keep working. Björn Roth has called their studio “a laboratory, to search for beauty in nothing.”

Dieter Roth and Björn Roth: Balabild 5 is curated by Jason Foumberg, Daskalopoulos Collection Manager.