Collaboration and exchange with other artists were fundamental throughout Dieter Roth’s life. The gallery alexander levy is pleased to present in its exhibition Ichbla willbla wasbla ichbla willbla! Roth’s works in dialogue with Elisa Jule Braun, Andreas Greiner and Anne Duk Hee Jordan.

Dieter Roth’s (1930-1998) multifaceted and multimedia oeuvre encompasses not only visual art but also literature and music. In his works, themes such as transience and life, deconstruction and creativity, playful humor and a critical questioning often appear side by side. Roth was concerned with blending art and life, so he also incorporated bodily functions and everyday routines such as eating or sleeping into his creative process. Organic material appears recurrently in his work, subject to the inevitable course of gradual change and decay.

Elisa Jule Braun’s video works, installations, and performances operate at the intersection of digital techniques, mass media image repertoires, and urban life-worlds. In her series HUMUS HUMANA (2017-ongoing), dust acts as a relic and trace of everyday experience. It simultaneously symbolizes existence as well as transience, ephemerality, and the past. Physical components such as skin and hair, as well as remnants of daily activities such as eating, inscribe themselves over time in the dust that Braun collects and preserves. The works in the series HUMUS HUMANA are thus dust landscapes of human dwellings, metaphorically presented along with a doorbell. Their price varies according to the price per square meter of the homes from which the dust originates.

Andreas Greiner’s artistic practice is concerned with human influence on the biological and atmospheric processes of the earth. In Etüden Für 6 Beine und 2 Flügel, the artist recorded the movements of six hatching flies whose movements create a silent composition over a blank sheet of music. Therese Strasser uses the position of the flies in the resulting video work as the starting point for a four-hand piano piece. As in Roth’s work, chance becomes a partner in the act of creation.

Anne Duk Hee Jordan uses nature and biological phenomena to create an often ironic dialogue between art, science, technology, society, and identity. Buchsbäume (2020), part of the series Artificial Stupidity, travel slowly through the gallery space. In Germany, box trees are often planted by people as boundaries between private and public spaces, or even between neighbors. However, due to their perpetual movement, this is no longer possible, and the bourgeois symbolism is taken ad absurdum. In the work Pferdeäpfel, Ziggy goes Wild, dried horse dung hangs from the ceiling on strings, through the work the artist humorously questions our relationship to the environment and its various inhabitants.