Born in Hannover, he spent his early years in Germany and Switzerland, developing an interest in art and poetry while living with a family of artists in Zürich during World War II.

Throughout his career, Roth pushed artistic boundaries by creating biodegradable artworks that evolved over time due to natural decay.

After seeing an exhibition of Paul Klee's work, "a shock that [was to] grow into an obsession",[5] he gradually moved from the style of commercial art he was being instructed in, towards international modernism.

Roth left home in 1953, and began to collaborate with Marcel Wyss and Eugen Gomringer on the magazine Spirale,[6] of which nine issues would be published (1953–64).

In 1960 he won the William and Norma Copley Award, which included Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Herbert Read on the jury.

[3] As well as a substantial monetary prize, the award included the chance to print a monograph; Roth declined, asking instead for funding to pay for a new work.

The work profoundly impressed Roth, leading to a decisive break with constructivism into post-modern avant-garde practices associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes such as Tinguely and Arman, and the group of artists that were about to become known as Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik.

Roth had also offered his artist's book Literaturwurst to Fluxus as a possible publisher in 1963, around the same time as the early Fluxkits (see Water Yam) but this was turned down by Maciunas.

[21] In 1964, Roth was commissioned, alongside several other artists, to paint a portrait of the collector and dealer Carl Laszlo to celebrate his fortieth birthday.

He then held a party inviting the students to remove anything they liked; the college rescinded its offer to publish the book, which ended up as Snow, finally printed in 1970.

[3] While in the US, Roth divorced Sigriđur but remained on good terms with the family, by now including three children: Karl, Björn and Vera.

[26][27][28] In 2010 Hauser & Wirth showed one such collaboration, a selection of collage-assemblages, made from the cardboard mats Roth would place on the worktables in his studios to collect the "traces of domestic activities," such as coffee stains and Björn's childish doodles.

[29] As his notoriety increased, his work rate became prolific with major bodies of work including books of poetry, artist's books, sculptures, paintings, multiples, sound recordings, collaborations with other artists such as Emmett Williams, Hermann Nitsch and Richard Hamilton, jewellery designs, furniture, posters, prints and installations.

[30] The first multiple was an edition of 100 cakes in the shape of a motorcyclist handed out at the opening to an exhibition of Roth's work at Gallery Hansjorg Mayer.

Instigated by Hansjörg Mayer, a publisher Roth had met in 1963, the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works) would run to 26 volumes, many of which are still easily available across Europe and America.

[34] Roth had started to compulsively paint over postcards in the early sixties, explaining that it was easier to paint over printed objects than blank canvases; one of his most famous works, 96 Piccadillies, 1977, grew out of this compulsion, having as its starting point Roth's encounter with the collection of postcards of Piccadilly Circus owned by Richard Hamilton and his wife Rita Donagh.

[35] Initially, six of these cards were printed as a large scale portfolio in 1970; eventually, in 1977, 96 of these altered Piccadillies were collected in a book, including the unaltered backs, with cut marks to allow the buyer to re-use them as postcards.

Gartenskulptor (Garden Sculpture), for instance, had started out as a copy of the multiple P.O.TH.A.A.VFB, a self-portrait bust made of chocolate and birdseed standing on a bird-table, exposed to the elements.

Referred to by Roth as a 'dis- and re-assembly object',[37] each new incarnation gradually acquired working drawings, paintings, sculpted rabbits and collages placed on trellises in collector's gardens.

By 2000, in Mönchengladbach, it was 40 metres long, having acquired elements from each of the installations' incarnations, including pebbly earth excavated by the architects Herzog and de Meuron for the facade of the Schaulager, for instance.

In his later years Dieter Roth spoke of his typically innovative idea of an academy an institution unbound to any one place or building or curriculum.

This has resulted in a number of publications, and an intensification of communications between the members that produces additional projects in line with the DRA ethos.