Lois Weinberger

Lois Weinberger (1947–2020) has, in his landscape works, played a decisive role in the debate on art and nature through to the present day. He is subsequently regarded as one of the most important contemporary artists. Until the end he worked on a poetic-political network, and also together with his wife Franziska on special projects for public spaces. In his activities as an artist working in the field he continued to focus on peripheral spaces, both urban and natural, as well as their reassessment and revaluation, to which end he developed his own aesthetics of vegetation.

In 1971 a large Swiss pharmaceutical concern published the portfolio Unkrautgemeinschaften Europas that included texts in seven languages. The portfolio contains photographs of plants listed by their Latin names. While such names are usually used for botanical identification, here the actual context is the control of such plants, for which the group produces the chemical eradicants that are presented in the appendix. Lois Weinberger exhibited the portfolio as a readymade. The photographs resemble still lifes in the tradition of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor Piece of Turf (1503). In view of calls for an “ecological art” and public expectations of the pharmaceutical industry, Weinberger’s work remains extremely current.

This portfolio of Lois Weinberger, a new acquisition, was being presented in the KUB basement to complement the main exhibition House of Meme by Pamela Rosenkranz. In addition to other exhibits, the sculpture Invasion (2013) was also on display, a life-size figure cast from aluminum from whose skin arboreal fungi grow.

In front of Kunsthaus Bregenz hundreds of tubs filled with earth were being arranged in a square. This work, titled mobile garden, has been carried out at various locations over the past few decades, including in 2017 for the Centre Pompidou in Metz. Air-born seeds will fertilize the earth and, through arbitary growth, create an island of plants in the middle of Karl-Tizian-Platz.