Ingrid Wiener

Ingrid Wiener creates hand-woven tapestries (Gobelins), watercolors, and drawings. Her tapestries, created through a time-consuming process, focus on the unassuming aspects of her immediate daily life. In doing so, the artist combines image and text in a unique way: notes, numbers, dates, and other abbreviations become integral parts of the woven images, some of which also incorporate Oswald Wiener’s ideas and notes.

The large-scale work Dr. Müllers Kabelfrühling (Cable Spring) offers a very direct depiction of the immediate surroundings that Wiener perceives from behind the loom. The historian Albert Müller, a close friend of the artist, played a key role in this: Wiener discovered a tangle of cables under his desk and spontaneously captured it in a photograph. Upon closer inspection, an association emerges between the materiality of computers and that of textile art. The power cords and connections, which were still openly visible at the dawn of our digital world, can be read as a continuation of a technological development that spans from the punch-card loom to our present-day, ubiquitous networking. This creates a dual reference: a real motif and, at the same time, an image that reflects the structural proximity of textiles and digital infrastructure.

The top row of the work JAQUARDBINDUNG draws on the punch cards of the Jacquard loom, which enable the automated control of complex patterns, thereby referencing punch-card weaving — a precursor to early computer systems. The tapestry Buchstabe E (Letter E) also alludes to computer systems through its symbolic nature, without, however, depicting them explicitly. In the center of the work, a section is deliberately left open, bringing the structure of the weaving itself to the forefront. The buckle fastener depicted in the tapestry titled Schnallenverschluss can be turned in two directions, creating a kind of mechanical interplay that evokes both mechanical structures and Oswald Wiener’s sketches.

Schnallenverschluß, 2019
Tapestry, wool, silk, rayon
37 × 65 cm

Dr. Müllers Kabelfrühling, 2008
Wool, silk, rayon, knitwear
120 × 180 cm
Courtesy MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Wien / Vienna

JAQUARDBINDUNG, 2019
Tapestry, wool, silk, rayon
50 × 100 cm

BUCHSTABE E, 2012
Tapestry, wool, silk, rayon
60 × 32 cm
Courtesy Charim Galerie, Vienna