David Roth(1942-)

Born in New York City in 1942, David Roth currently resides in Claverack, NY. He studied at the Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus) at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. In 1963 he was a performer in Claus Oldenburg's Happening "Gayety." Later studies were with Ivan Chermayeff, Clay Felker, Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
From the mid-1960's through the mid-1980's, Roth was extremely productive and influential. He was invited frequently for group shows and one-man shows in Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Boston, Buffalo and New York, including the prestigious Robert Elkon Gallery in New York City, which represented him. Roth's works are in numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Newark Museum of Art, the Albright Knox Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Teheran, Iran (a gift from Nelson Rockefeller) as well as corporate and private collections. Corporate commissions include paintings for Johnson & Johnson, Coopers & Lybrand, IBM, Phillip Morris and SmithKline Philadelphia. His original works have been available over the years at several galleries, from New York to Los Angeles, from Paris to Stockholm. Various publishers have issued over 60 editions of his prints. Roth stopped painting, drawing and printmaking for almost 15 years, yet his work continued to be collected and exhibited. In 2000, the Lin-Weinberg Gallery in New York City exhibited and sold a large collection of his vintage prints. In 2001 he began to work again and returned anew to concepts concerning dimensionality and surface which he explored in his graphite works. A show of his large scale (8' x 8' & 4'x 4') new graphites at the Liz O'Brien Gallery in New York City was completely sold out.
Roth begins by drawing a color program on graph paper, and then uses this program as a guide to translate the two-dimensional drawing into a three-dimensional work comprised of strings painted with liquitex (acrylic). The strings are tied in bunches and closely hung from a wooden bar, creating the sense of a canvas painting. The individually dyed strings hang from the supporting band of wood like a curtain of tones and hues, creating surface, space and color. The wall behind forms the ground for the vertical spacing of strings, which explore the entire color spectrum.
In some "programs" the colors "metamorphose" through each other horizontally. In others, the strings are cut at different lengths, adding to the sense of movement and overall richness of the paintings.