Ingrid Wiener, Viennese Actionist and Dieter Roth Collaborator, Dies at 83

Ingrid Wiener, the Viennese Actionist artist known for tapestries woven with fragments of everyday life and for collaborations with Valie Export and Dieter Roth, has died at 83, just shy of her 84th birthday. Charim Gallery, her Vienna representative, announced the death in an Instagram post and did not state a cause.

For decades, Wiener shaped the Austrian art scene through combined textile, photography, painting, and collage works — and through partnerships with two of postwar Austria's most consequential artists.

"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."

What made her tapestries unusual?

Wiener's woven works integrate objects and fragments of her daily life: cutting boards, old shopping lists, newspapers, cables, even cucumbers. Handwritten texts often run through the visual compositions, embedding her emotions, thoughts, and personal observations directly into the fabric.

She is also renowned for her dream-inspired watercolors, or "Traumzeichnungen," in which she recorded dreams, thoughts, and narratives as strange reinterpretations of daily life.

How did she come to Viennese Actionism?

Born Ingrid Schuppan on October 2, 1942, she befriended Waltraud Höllinger — later known as Valie Export — during her training at a textile school. There Wiener learned weaving, found coconspirators, and developed her signature style.

Like other members of Viennese Actionism, active in the Austrian capital in the 1960s and '70s, Wiener pushed back against the country's conservative postwar society.

As early as the 1960s, Wiener and Export wove tapestries using designs by their friend Friedensreich Hundertwasser, exhibited and sold under his name. By the mid-1970s, Wiener completed her first large-scale tapestry in collaboration with Export and the Swiss artist Dieter Roth. The trio tried to invent a new form of tapestry by weaving only what could be seen behind the warp threads. The idea proved nearly impossible to realize fully, but the concept of a fluid, non-rigid weaving style became central to Wiener's practice.

Between 1974 and 1997, Wiener and Roth created five more collaborative tapestries. She also worked with Konrad Bayer and Ferry Radax, appearing with Bayer in Radax's surreal film Sonne halt! in 1959.

What about her life beyond the studio?

Wiener married Oswald Wiener, a writer, artist, and fellow Viennese Actionist who died in 2021. In 1969 the couple moved to Berlin, where she opened several establishments, including the restaurant Exile, to which she lent her culinary skills. Exile became a meeting place for the art crowd, drawing guests such as David Bowie and Peter O'Toole.

The couple later moved to Canada. Its landscapes inspired inner, surreal images from Wiener's dreams, which she captured in watercolors.

Will her work be shown again soon?

Wiener's career gained renewed attention in Austria at the turn of the 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.

The gallery went on to represent her formally, mounting several solo and two-person shows. It is currently planning a major exhibition of Wiener's work and her historical collaboration with Export for early next year — a posthumous showcase for a body of work straddling textiles, painting, photographs, and collage, and tied to one of the most important chapters of Austrian art.