Collectable

No BOREDOM allowed. Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth in Cadaqués

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

In July 1977, Dieter Roth arrived in Cadaqués, where Richard Hamilton spent his summers. Upon his arrival, he took a sketchbook and began applying all kinds of materials, including pencil, ink, salami, cigarette butts, and sea urchin remains. He then passed the pages to Hamilton to see whether he wished to continue working on them, as they had done on other occasions. Hamilton commissioned a carpenter to produce sixty wooden panels the size of the notebook pages, painted them white, mounted Roth’s creations onto them, and continued working on the pieces. All of them were human portraits. The two friends realised that some of the images bore a resemblance to their self-portraits, so they assembled them into thirty pairs. Thus, INTERFACEs was born.

Shortly thereafter, Roth suggested that they photograph themselves attempting to appear as they did in the paintings. The photographic sessions took place in London a few months later. Hamilton filtered the negatives to achieve a closer resemblance to the paintings, which were presented as triptychs that could be combined in different ways depending on whether the right or left panels were open or closed. The creative complicity between Roth and Hamilton makes it impossible to distinguish between the two authors in a body of work that is fresh, ironic, and deliberately playful.