MILAN.- Islands, an anthological exhibition by Dieter Roth and Björn Roth, is on view November 6, 2013 through February 9, 2014 at HangarBicocca, the contemporary art space in Milan promoted by Pirelli. It is the first exhibition curated by the Artistic Advisor Vicente Todolí as part of his curatorial program.

For the first time in Italy, the exhibition brings together over 50 works by Dieter Roth (Hannover, 1930 – Basel, 1998), a key figure on the international art scene of the past fifty years. It is being put on with the collaboration of his son Björn. The imposing installations are given the unique opportunity to interact with the former industrial space of HangarBicocca. The public will be taken on a journey through thematic "islands" in the multidisciplinary creative universe of the artist, whose work has revolutionized the way art is made and seen.

Roth Bar, covering over 60 square meters, is open to the public and fully operational, consisting of the bar itself and a number of videos, drawings, paintings, musical instruments and bottles used during its operation. It greets the visitors and captures them in an uninterrupted flow of art production and daily life—a stylistic feature of all the work by Roth and his assistants.

This aspect runs through all the works in the exhibition, such as The Floor I (1973-1992) and The Floor II (1977-1998), both of which consist of floors from the artist's studio in Iceland. Here they are taken out of context and transformed into abstract images, forming the backdrop to a real kitchen (New York Kitchen, 2013), which has also been used by Dieter Roth's staff to prepare some of the works on show.

An insatiable researcher in every field of creativity and knowledge, Dieter Roth was a graphic artist, poet, musician and designer. He explored every medium and type of art, combining painting, sculpture, printing, photography, videos and sound in all-encompassing works. Fascinated by the mechanisms of transformation, Roth used a vast array of materials and objects such as utensils, furnishings, monitors and food in a process that revealed the constant mutability of the work. His creations in chocolate and sugar—two towers made of little self-portrait and zoomorphic sculptures titled Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower), 1994-2013 and Selbstturm (Self Tower), 1994-2013—will be on display.

Dieter Roth’s interest in the olfactory, chromatic and sculptural characteristics of organic materials and their decay led him to transform an old house in Hamburg into the Schimmelmuseum (Mould Museum). This exhibition space, where the artist displayed his works made mainly between 1964 and 1971, was open to the public until 2004.

Dieter Roth's artistic vision, which includes knowledge and action, experience and manual skills in performative works, is fully illustrated at HangarBicocca. During the installation, the 4500 square meters of exhibition space devoted to the display was turned into a workshop—a craftsman's studio where the "Roth dynasty" continues to hand down ways of creating art in the making. The works are not just installed but also, in some cases, produced by his son Björn, who worked with his father for over twenty years, and by the artist's historic collaborators including his grandchildren Oddur and Einar. Works on show resulting from the cooperation between the artist and his son include Material Pictures, assemblages of abstract painting and superimpositions of materials such as clothes, fabrics and instruments, and Grosse Tischruine (Large Table Ruin). Begun in 1978 as an organism in perennial transformation, this work started out from a pile of objects on Dieter Roth's own workbench, rearranged in different ways for each exhibition.

Real-life experience and art intertwine and blend together also in the large Solo Scenes installation (1997-1998), one of the artist's best-known works that was also shown at documenta 11 in 2002 and at the most recent Venice Biennale. One hundred and thirty-one monitors show everyday and intimate scenes of the artist, creating an open, real-time diary of the last years of his life. In 55 Schisse für Rosanna (55 Shits for Rosanna), 1982 and in die Die DIE VERDAMMTE SCHEISSE (the The THE DAMNED SHIT),1974-1975, on the other hand, we find provocative images of the artist's daily production of excrement elegantly placed on serving dishes or in travel cases, creating a disorienting contrast.

The exhibition also celebrates Iceland, beloved by the artist, who lived there with his first wife, the mother of his four children. The island is a powerful part of the iconography that he produced right up to the time of his death. Reykjavík Slides (1973-1975 and 1990-1998) is an exceptional documentation of the over 30,000 buildings that existed in the island's capital until 1998, while the SURTSEY and SURTSEY - Dinner series (1974) consists of 36 prints of the island of Surtsey, which formed in 1963 after the eruption of an underwater volcano.

The over 60 Piccadillies prints, here shown together for the first time, constitute one of the artist's most original and interesting projects. Created between 1969 and 1974, they became a stunning example of Dieter Roth's passion for prints and graphic art, which played a key role in his work. The prints are the result of an innovative process perfected by the artist himself: the pictures of the famous square in London, taken from postcards in the collection of Rita Donagh (the wife of the artist Richard Hamilton and herself an artist) were blown up and reprocessed with broad swathes of colour, creating unique pieces that invite us to reflect on the concept of the original and of reproducibility in works of art.