With an artist like Lois Weinberger, everything “is connected to everything else” – his origins in a barren Tyrolean landscape, his gardening interests over many years making scrub sculptures on urban wasteland, his interest in open-ended sculptures which undergo permanent change.

The formal appearance of Weinberger’s work has gone through many metamorphoses. One has seen carefully laid stone walls with concrete-filled plastic bags. One has seen meticulous drawings of thistles and photos of with rampant-growth, pioneer plants.

A term central to Weinberger’s work is the “Ruderalpflanzen” or “weeds”. Behind two closed tin doors of a wayside house is a herbarium with stored plants and seeds. In 1994, the artist confirmed his positions as a “gardener” amongst the spontaneous vegetation in an urban wilderness in Berlin – there, where only a few years before the wall had allowed nature unrestricted wild growth. Along with photos from Berlin and Vienna, the “picture work” shows a design for a “Ruderaltisch” in the Federal Ministry for Agriculture in Gleisdorf, an open-air, concrete table on which earth-filled paint buckets and tin cans stand. On the subject of the thistle drawing Weinberger wrote: “repetition as the maxim of creation”.

 

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)

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