Ingrid Wiener

Ingrid Wiener’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven is the first institutional solo show by the Austrian artist (born 1942 in Vienna) in Germany. Ingrid Wiener is an important figure in Austria’s art scene. She was in close contact with the Vienna Actionists and already participated in actions by the group in the late 1950s. While initially collaborating and realizing joint projects with Dieter Roth, VALIE EXPORT and Oswald Wiener, among others, she subsequently produced her own tapestries and expanded her practice to include cooking performances, music projects, photographic and film works, as well as dream drawings. She was furthermore the head chef and co-owner of the legendary artists’ venues “Matala,” “Exil” and “Ax Bax” in Berlin, places where she not only developed her passion for cooking, but which were also frequented by artists such as Markus Lüpertz, Martin Kippenberger and the “Junge Wilde,” as well as David Bowie, Jack Nicholson, Max Frisch, and Peter O‘Toole.

Wiener’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle takes a retrospective approach and provides insights into the variegated oeuvre of the artist, who is best known for her tapestries that she rediscovered as a contemporary medium. The tapestries she initially made with VALIE EXPORT for Friedensreich Hundertwasser and later in a years-long collaboration with Dieter Roth mainly focus on her everyday surroundings and are dedicated to what is seemingly insignificant and incidental: For example, a tangle of cables under the desk, pipes under her bathroom floor, scenes in front of her window, shopping lists, or shoes. Wiener’s tapestries are “entirely autobiographic,” as Michaela Leutzendorff Pakesch, the co-curator of the show, points out. “She weaves remnants of life, fragments of memories, things and places that have touched her.” These trivia appear to contradict the essence of tapestry weaving, which, due to the elaborate and slow process, was traditionally reserved for significant moments and motifs. The protracted and time-consuming activity associated with the process of weaving that—like cooking and acting as a host—demands constant attention and care, can be read as a feminist practice based on a feminist ethics of care. A practice that, by shifting the “action” from immediacy, independence and autonomy to duration, dependence and relationality, stands in opposition to the confrontational actionist practices of many artists of Wiener’s generation.

With the same attentiveness, the exhibition also looks at Wiener’s practice as a filmmaker and additionally presents a selection of her dream watercolors—works in which the artist captures her dreams in image-text arrangements, often depicting absurd, surreal and humorously quirky variations of actual occurrences in her life.

Ingrid Wiener has realized solo exhibitions at, among others, Kunsthaus Graz (2023), Museum Hartberg (2020), Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin (2019), Helga Klosterfelde, Berlin (2019), the Jagla-Ausstellungsraum, Cologne (2018), Kunsthaus Mürz, Mürzzuschlag (2012), the Charim Galerie, Vienna (2008), the Neue Galerie Graz, Graz (2006), and Edizioni Morra, Naples (2001). Her works have also been shown in numerous group exhibitions in Austria, Italy, France, Germany, China, Canada, and Switzerland.

Curated by Stefanie Kleefeld and Michaela Leutzendorff Pakesch.