Ingrid Wiener, Viennese Actionist Artist and Collaborator of Valie Export and Dieter Roth, Dies at 83

Viennese Actionist artist Ingrid Wiener died at the age of 83, just shy of her 84th birthday, Charim Gallery announced in an Instagram post. The gallery did not state a cause of death.

For decades, Wiener shaped the Austrian art scene with her combined textile, photography, painting, and collage works, as well as through notable collaborations with the likes of Valie Export and Dieter Roth.

Wiener’s tapestries integrate objects and fragments of her everyday life, among them, cutting boards, old shopping lists, newspapers, cables, and even cucumbers. Handwritten texts are often interwoven into visual compositions, further embedding her emotions, thoughts, and personal observations directly into the fabric. She is also renowned for her dream-inspired watercolors or “Traumzeichnungen,” wherein she records dreams, thoughts, and narratives into strange reinterpretations of daily life.

As with other members of Viennese Actionism, active in the 1960s and ’70s in the Austrian capital, Weiner’s work sought to rebel against the country’s conservative society in the decades following World War II.

Born Ingrid Schuppan on October 2, 1942, she befriended Waltraud Höllinger, who later became known as Valie Export, during her training at a textile school. Here, Wiener not only learned the art of weaving but also found coconspirators and developed her own signature style.

As early as the 1960s, Wiener and Export created tapestries using the designs of another friend Friedensreich Hundertwasser, which were exhibited and sold under his name. This collaboration spurred others and, by the mid-1970s, Wiener completed her first large-scale tapestry in collaboration with Export and fellow Swiss artist Dieter Roth. Together, they sought to invent a new form of tapestry by only weaving what could be seen behind the warp threads. Though the idea proved nearly impossible to fully realize, the concept of a more fluid, non-rigid weaving style became central to Wiener’s practice.

Between 1974 and 1997, Wiener and Roth again came together to create an additional five collaborative tapestries together. Weiner’s collaborative spirit also extended beyond mediums and to others in her circle as well, including such artists as Konrad Bayer and Ferry Radax. Weiner, with Bayer, participated in Radax’s surreal film Sonne halt! in 1959.

She later married Oswald Wiener, a writer and artist who was also a Viennese Actionist; he died in 2021. In 1969, the couple moved to Berlin, where Wiener opened several establishments, including the restaurant Exile to which Ingrid lended her culinary skills. Exile quickly became a well-known meeting place among the art crowd, with such guests as David Bowie and Peter O’Toole.

Later, the couple moved to Canada, whose landscapes inspired inner and surreal images from Wiener’s dreams that she captured in watercolors. Wiener not only leaves behind a richly complex body of work straddling textiles, painting, photographs, and collages, but also a career intricately connected to one of the most important chapters of Austrian art.

Wiener’s career received renewed attention in Austria at the turn of the new millennium. Charim Gallery first showed her work in its 2001 exhibition “Diesseits und Jenseits des Traums: 100 Jahre Jacques Lacan” (This Side of the Dream and the Other: 100 Years of Jacques Lacan). “While searching for artistic positions for the exhibition, August Ruhs introduced us to Ingrid’s dream drawings, and we were immediately captivated by them,” the gallery wrote in its Instagram post.

Soon after, Charim Gallery began formally representing her work, mounting several solo- and two-person shows featuring her art. It is currently planning a major exhibition of Wiener’s work and her historical collaboration with Export for early next year.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Ingrid Wiener,” Miryam Charim, owner of Charim Gallery, said in a statement. “Over the years, our artistic collaboration with Ingrid developed into a close personal friendship. Ingrid was far more to us than an artist represented by the gallery. It is painful to lose Ingrid.”