Rot ist eine schnelle Farbe (Red is a fast colour) – this sentence refers to a scene in the Austrian TV series Schlawiner, in which two regulars philosophise about colour perception in the context of motor racing. Years earlier, David Roth (born 1985 in Oberpullendorf, AT) had already read about ‘fast’ and ‘fleeting’ colours while reading Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Pittura – the standard work on the art of painting written in the 15th century, which is regarded as the first modern theory of painting. Roth’s work moves between these two poles – art-theoretical analysis and everyday philosophical humour – as a serious yet playful questioning of what painting is – and can be. David Roth’s artistic work always revolves around a central question: What is painting – and what can it be? Also: What do we expect from it?
In his multimedia work, which ranges from performative actions to installation and video to painting, Roth does not understand painting as a finished picture, but as a process, as an action – as a doing.
In his exhibition Rot ist eine schnelle Farbe (Red is a fast colour), Roth is showing current works from the Flower Paintings series, which were created between 2023 and 2025. Here, flowers serve as brushes, layers of colour are painted over and condensed, traces are made visible and concealed at the same time. The exhibition is complemented by an early work from the Sun Paintings series (2018), in which months of exposure to the elements create naturally grown imprints on coloured cloth – painting through light and time.
A video of the landscape work Le Pré de l’Orme and small-format oil paintings with multi-layered overpaintings provide an insight into Roth’s exploration of layering, memory, transformation and environment. The works move between conception and intuition, between analysis and poetry – and invite us to rethink painting.
The group of works called Brains – sculptural bodies composed of the most diverse components of previous painting processes – sets a special accent within the exhibition. Layered on top of each other, they include cut-out canvases, painted pieces of fabric, used pallets, cleaning rags, test scraps, floor coverings and fragments of discarded compositions. Much of this comes from the simple, often invisible activities that precede the visible works: trying out, wiping away, discarding, making notes. What otherwise remains in the background takes centre stage here – condensed into a form that eludes the classic image size and gains a new presence as a sculptural object. Painting becomes sculpture. It also creates a space for thought, in which detours, traces and remnants are seen not as deficiencies, but as actual substance. – Julia Moebus-Puck, director of the Vienna Actionism Museum.
