Austrian artist Ingrid Wiener dies at 83

Austrian artist Ingrid Wiener has died at the age of 83.

The Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna and Charim Gallery in Vienna announced her death. Vienna.at reported the announcements, with ARTnews also reporting the news on 2 October 2026.

Wiener was associated with Viennese Actionism. The term describes a 1960s movement in Vienna built around direct, often confrontational performance that used the body. It is a label that often appears alongside her name, and it helps place where she started.

She did not work in one medium alone. Her works combined textile, photography, painting and collage. In simple terms, that meant woven cloth shown together with photographic images, paint and cut-and-pasted paper.

That mix matters for anyone seeing the work for the first time. Textile brings thread, weave and texture. Photography brings a fixed image. Paint and collage add colour, surface and layering. Wiener brought those elements into the same pieces.

One collaborator was Valie Export. The fact of a collaboration means the two artists worked together on shared pieces or ideas. It is one of two working partnerships noted in her obituary.

The other was Dieter Roth. Their collaboration ran over several years. In one arrangement, Wiener wove a tapestry based on ideas by Roth. Weaving here means making cloth on a loom, thread by thread.

Tapestry stayed central to her practice. She made about 40 tapestries in total, according to Marta Herford, the museum for contemporary art in Herford, Germany. Marta Herford Drawings are also recorded as part of what she made.

A long Roth collaboration resulted in Large Tapestry, dated 1981 to 1986. The dates show a work developed over a five-year span. The piece is made of woven wool and wood and measures 220 by 182 cm, which is taller than most doorways and wide enough to fill a wall.

The work is held by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The museum lists it as a gift of Franz Wassmer, which means it entered the collection as a donation rather than a purchase. MoMA

The announcements gave her age as 83. They came from a museum and a gallery that had both shown and supported her work.