Complete Catalogue

‘For me, art is work. It is my need, my life.’

The artistic spectrum of Peter Weihs, born in 1940 as the second eldest child of 14 children in Mödling near Vienna, manifests itself in three genres of fine art: painting, sculpture and drawing. Sculptures made of ceramic, wood, polyester or bronze, paintings and graphic works, structure an extremely multi-layered oeuvre that consistently defies any art-historical categorisation.

Peter Weihs passed the entrance examination for the ceramics class at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna at the age of fifteen, and Robert Obsieger and Heinz Leinfellner became his teachers. In 1972, Weihs accepted an appointment as a lecturer in ceramics at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa and taught for 20 years in the lively, vibrant capital of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) alongside his continuing artistic activities. During this particularly fruitful period of intercultural work, he created works in various techniques of visual art. In 1992, the artist returned to Austria due to the difficult political situation. There he initially worked again in his studio in Mödling until 2007, when he moved into his new studio in an old farmhouse in Neusiedl near Güssing. The years leading up to his death in 2021 represent another creative phase in which he increasingly devoted himself to painting.

Beginning with the cubist-like early work of the 1960s, through the sculptures and paintings inspired by African culture, to the fascinating search pictures and the worlds of figures overflowing with colour and form from his last creative period, one is almost overwhelmed by the artistic universality and creative power of his works.