Large Figure

‘For me, art is work. It may well be that my work is art. It is my need and my life.’1 The artistic universality and creativity of Peter Weihs, born in Mödling near Vienna as the second-eldest son of fourteen children in 1940, is manifested in three genres of the fine arts: sculpture, painting and drawing. Sculptures made of ceramics as well as of wood, sandstone, polyester, concrete or bronze, along with (mainly) large-format paintings and graphic works all form a highly complex oeuvre, one which consistently eludes any form of art-historical categorisation. At the young age of fifteen, Peter Weihs passes the entrance exam to the ceramics class at the Academy (now University) of Applied Arts in Vienna; his teachers are Robert Obsieger and Heinz Leinfellner. In 1972 Weihs accepts an appointment as lecturer in ceramics at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa – the only art academy at university level in Central Africa. Here he teaches for 20 years, parallel to his continued work as an artist,
in the vibrantly joyous, pulsating capital of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Peter Weihs’ artistic work is characterised by a pronounced preference for narrative, by formal clarity and bold use of colour. The delightful tension between the constructive and organic, between pointed forms and soft curves, squares, triangular structures, circles, round and square geometrical bodies is materialised into bright, cheerful ceramic sculptures of richly contrasting colours. ‘My objects have experienced and survived the fire, have expansion gaps and scratches, shrinkages, finger prints, cracks, squashings [...] for an ultimately imperfect surface. [...] In this way each of my objects is shown as almost human again in the spontaneity of its creation – for no two are alike.’2