Mourning and remembering Björn Roth / 2026.01.02. 🎨 🇩🇪 🇨🇭 🇮🇸

Known for his multidisciplinary practice spanning performance, painting, and sculpture, and for his enduring collaboration with his father, Dieter Roth, the renowned Swiss-German artist, this formative background significantly shaped his own artistic trajectory.
Beyond his collaborative efforts, Roth developed an independent practice that explored similar concerns through his distinct lens. His individual output included paintings, drawings, and sculptural works that frequently incorporated found objects, foodstuffs, and domestic detritus, transforming them into poetic reflections on existence. Living and working primarily in Iceland, his art often drew from his immediate environment, embracing an improvisational spirit and a dedication to the ongoing, lived experience of art.

„Björn played a vital role in moments of our shared history—from inaugurating our New York gallery in 2013 with a joint father-and-son exhibition, to becoming, alongside Oddur Roth, our first artists-in-residence at the Maltings in Somerset in 2014, where they created the original Roth Bar.” - hauserwirth

During his teenage years, Björn worked somewhat on music creation, but that music had little to do with traditional melodies or rhythms, but was rather experimental and often significantly at odds with what was usually heard on popular charts or radio stations in general. Several albums related to his musical creation were released by Roth Records, a kind of family publishing company in the spirit of the Roth father and son.

Björn Roth's best-known musical project is the band Bruni BB, which he formed with several of his friends in the new art department of the Icelandic School of Fine Arts (MHÍ). The band's most famous incident is related to the film Rock in Reykjavík (1982) by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, who managed to capture some of the violence on film, which featured chicken slaughter and various other misdeeds in the name of performance, accompanied by peculiar music that was mostly played from tape. Björn is said to have played bass or guitar in the band. The band performed several times and always attracted attention and even a sense of fear because people never knew what would happen next. The police were sometimes called, including during the filming of Rock in Reykjavík, when five police officers famously tried to harm Björn with an abandoned chainsaw on stage.

Groups: Bárðarbúðarböðlarnir, Bruni BB

 

	Freddy And The Fighters Featuring Björn Roth – Freddy And The Fighters (LP, Ltd)	Dieter Roth's Familienverlag	66.21 457-01.1		1977
	Dieter Roth (2) & Björn Roth – Autofahrt (LP, Ltd)	Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Dieter Roth's Verlag	none		1979
	Bárðarbúðarböðlarnir & Björn Roth – Afurðir: Bárðarbúðarböðlarnir „Live“ Í Ásgarði (LP, Album, Ltd)	Dieter Roth's Verlag, Pöpull ehf	JST 262, Pöpull No/1

www.discogs.com

 

 

„Björn was one of the first artists to exhibit in the Skaftfell Gallery in 1999 when the gallery was inaugurated after renovations. There he was in good company, along with the artists Bernd Koberling and his father Dieter Roth (1930-1998). More than ten years later, in 2010, Björn opened a solo exhibition in Skaftfell, where another good man who has recently passed away wrote the exhibition text, Guðmundur Oddur Magnússon (1955-2026).

From the beginning, Björn was a key figure when it came to choosing artists to exhibit and setting up exhibitions in Skaftfell. Through his help, many well-known artists came, including the aforementioned Bernd Koberling, along with Olav Christopher Jenssen, Paul Osipow and Fredie Beckmans. In addition, Björn curated several important exhibitions, e.g. Art Around the Town in 2005, which was part of the Á Seyði art festival, and Ferðalag in 2008, which was part of the Reykjavík Arts Festival. He also curated Skaftfell’s 15th anniversary exhibition, Hnallþóra in the Sun, in 2013. There were many prints by Dieter on display, and the exhibition was well-received. It later travelled to Hafnarfjörður and was installed in Hafnarborg in 2014.

In collaboration with Kristján Steingrím Jónsson, Björn took the initiative to develop Skaftfell’s most extensive collaborative project from the beginning, the course Seyðisfjörður Workshop. The workshop was held a total of eighteen times from 2001 to 2018, for BA graduates in the Department of Fine Arts at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. The workshop’s partner was the Dieter Roth Academy, and later, the Technical Museum was added. Every year in January, a group of students from the south would come and stay in Seyðisfjörður for two weeks with the aim of creating a new work of art and opening an exhibition. The emphasis was on introducing the students to Dieter’s working methods and working with the special conditions that the fjord offers.

The openings of these exhibitions developed into key events in Seyðisfjörður’s cultural life; they were a harbinger of spring, always very well attended and always a lot of fun. In total, almost 200 students attended the workshop, and many of them have returned to Seyðisfjörður to work on various projects, including in collaboration with Skaftfell. At the time of writing, a group of students from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Seyðisfjörður are taking part in a workshop led by two artists who were students in Björn’s first workshop, which was held 25 years ago.” - skaftfell.is (from Guðmund Odd Magnússon for Björns exhibition in 2010)

 

Information: heni.com, glatkistan.com

Illustration: mbl.is