Ingrid Wiener, Martin Roth

Two artists, two generations. Two first major retrospectives that complement each other in their conceptual approaches. One weaves what she sees, draws and writes what she dreams, takes photos from the plane and is famous for her cuisine. The other, a generation younger, starts with painting, expands into space, creates landscapes, and devotes himself to conceptual and minimal art from the perspective of everything alive. Carpets overgrown with grass, snails in a Donald Judd, ducks mapping the studio. What unites both is the consistently inclusive and eternally inquiring gaze from a distance.

The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz brings together works by Ingrid Wiener and Martin Roth giving rise to a world of wonderous networks. Ingrid Wieners dream drawings, her tapestries and films, often created in exchange with others and her immediate environment, are juxtaposed with the installations, films and two-dimensional works of Martin Roth, who has dedicated his art to creating and nurturing the living itself. Roth, originally from Styria and living in New York, sadly passed away much too early in 2019, just when his work had become widely internationally recognized. Ingrid Wiener, on the other hand, is a well-known figure in the Austrian art scene. She participated in actions of the Wiener Gruppe, worked on tapestries and films with Dieter Roth, VALIE EXPORT and Oswald Wiener and only settled down in Austria about ten years ago after working in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Canada. 

The show creates an artistic dialogue as symbiosis of life and things, in which time and space is interwoven. It depicts a world that seems reminiscent of Haraway's famous Chthulucene: man is fleeting here – well placed not at the center but at the edges of these ever-changing worlds: observing, enabling and learning.

Thanks to Martin Roth Archive with Margret and Hans Roth, Natural history Museum/UMJ, Tierwelt Herberstein as well as to Franz Wassmer, Galerie Charim and Galerie Barbara Wien.