Lois & Franziska Weinberger

• 13.09.–14.10.2006

From September 12 until October 14, 2006, the Galerie Martin Janda is showing new works by Lois and Franziska Weinberger. Since the acclaimed exhibit in the Vienna’s Museum des 20. Jahrhundert (Museum of the Twentieth Century) in 2000, their work has been shown in museums and art institutions in Europe and in Japan. In 1999, they began to document the long-standing collaboration by crediting both names.

The current exhibit focuses on works by Lois and Franziska Weinberger which were executed outdoors, or which are based on intensive research in diverse regions and landscapes. In these projects, which typically continue for a number of years, the artists set out plants in remote, uninhabited areas and wastelands, continued to care for them, and documented their development.

On the gallery’s ground floor seed collections are presented in salvaged wooden tables refashioned as display cases: collected, dried, designated, identified, reworked, and assembled. The collection of ruderal seeds — from plants which grow at dumps or at the roadside — raises issues regarding society and community. Superimpositions and parallels which arise are not articulated in a direct manner; they do not lend themselves to decipherable dissent or societal analysis.

As second large group of works, we are showing Pflanzenfarbtafeln, 2005/06. Eyebright, laburnum, buckhorn and mugwort — plant names such as these constitute the formal point of departure for this work. The text is distorted and deformed with the assistance of a copying machine; the results are then transferred to diverse materials. These boards are then painted in the colours of the respective plants’ blossoms. Traces which bark beetles have left in earlier works are intentionally reproduced here with technical handiwork. Once again, what at first appears to be random is in fact subject to a straightforward system.