As early as the 1960s, Ingrid Wiener and VALIE EXPORT created tapestries for their friend Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Yet these works followed his designs and were exhibited and sold exclusively under his name. In the mid-1970s, Ingrid Wiener completed her first large-scale tapestry in collaboration with the artists Dieter Roth and VALIE EXPORT. After finishing the work, each artist continued independently, but the collaboration sparked a lasting artistic approach. Together, they sought to invent a new form of tapestry weaving based on a radical principle: to weave only what could be seen behind the warp threads. Although the idea proved nearly impossible to realise fully, its spirit of fluid, non-rigid weaving has remained central to Wiener’s practice ever since.
Between 1974 and 1997, Wiener and Dieter Roth created five collaborative tapestries. Their works have been exhibited internationally at MAC Marseille, the Vienna Secession, Schaulager in Basel, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other institutions.
Wiener’s tapestries draw from the objects and fragments of everyday life: cutting boards, old shopping lists, cables, or cucumbers resting on newspaper. Rather than simply weaving images, she incorporates handwritten texts into the compositions, embedding her moods, reflections, and personal observations directly into the fabric.
Ingrid Wiener is also renowned for her dream watercolours, the “Traumzeichnungen.” In these works, she records dreams, thoughts, and nocturnal narratives in watercolour, transforming real experiences into strange, often absurd reinterpretations of daily life.
Recent institutional presentations of Wiener’s work include the major survey exhibition Ingrid Wiener – Einfach machen und tun at Marta Herford, Germany (2025–26), bringing together her tapestries, dream drawings, and collaborative works. Her work is also currently featured in the group exhibition A.rtificial I.ntrospection O. (A.I.O.) at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, which explores perception, subjectivity, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence through the legacy of her late husband, Oswald Wiener (1935–2021), whose thinking since the 1950s critically engaged these fields while systematically resisting institutional appropriation.