Ingrid Wiener dies: the Viennese tapestry artist, collaborator of Valie Export and Dieter Roth

Austrian artist Ingrid Wiener has died at the age of 83, one day before her 84th birthday. The news was announced by Vienna’s Charim Gallery in an Instagram post, without giving the cause of death, as USA Art News reports. Born Ingrid Schuppan on October 2, 1942 in Vienna, Wiener was one of the most original figures of post-war Austrian art, with a body of work spanning textiles, photography, painting and collage.

Wiener became known for her tapestries — woven hangings in which she interwove objects and fragments of everyday life: cutting boards, old shopping lists, newspapers, cables, even cucumbers on newspaper. She often wove handwritten texts into them as well, turning her personal feelings and observations into visual language, while her dream watercolours — the so-called “Traumzeichnungen” — gave form to her dreams and thoughts. Among her most important collaborations were those with Valie Export and the Swiss artist Dieter Roth: between 1974 and 1997 they together made five tapestries, among them “Large Tapestry” (1981–1986), which is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Her life was as unusual as her work. In the 1960s she collaborated with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and took part in Ferry Radax’s film “Sonne halt!” (1959) with Konrad Bayer. In 1969 she fled with her partner, the writer Oswald Wiener, to West Berlin, where together they opened the famous artists’ venues Matala, Exil and Ax Bax — Exil became a centre for the intellectuals and the artistic and literary avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s, with guests such as David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Joseph Beuys and Peter O’Toole. In 1986 the couple moved to Dawson City, in Canada’s Yukon, where the dream watercolours were born; later they returned to Europe and settled in south-eastern Styria. Her husband, Oswald Wiener, died in 2021.

Institutional recognition came late, but deservedly: in 2024 she was awarded the Austrian Art Prize for Visual Arts. Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, which holds her multi-part installation “Norden” (2010–2012) in its collection, commemorated her with an official announcement, in which director general Stella Rollig called her “an extraordinary artist who constantly opened the boundaries between art and life”. The Charim Gallery, which had represented her since 2001 and was preparing a major exhibition of her work for the beginning of next year, announced that the artistic collaboration with Wiener had over the years turned into a close personal friendship.