Anita Steinwidder is an Austrian textile and mixed-media artist who lives and works in Vienna. She studied architecture at the University of Technology in Graz (Diploma 2000) and in 2002 founded her fashion label STEINWIDDER, through which she spent fifteen years exploring clothing as sculptural objects and as a medium of social reflection. Working with textile surplus materials, she developed concept-driven collections that addressed ecological and social questions; her work was presented internationally in exhibitions, projects, and runway formats.
Since 2014, Steinwidder has focused entirely on visual arts. She combines found objects with textile techniques to create sculptural works, assemblages, and installations situated at the intersection of material research, memory culture, and narrative object-making. Her practice extends her long-standing engagement with material transformation, reassigning form, function, and meaning through meticulous handcraft and conceptual reframing.
Member of Künstlerhaus Vereinigung; IG Bildende Kunst; Bildrecht; Intakt - Internationale Aktionsgemeinschaft bildender Künstlerinnen; Berufsverband der bildenden Künstler Österreichs; TFR (Teresa Feodorowna Ries) Archive; quit nature;
AWARDS AND PRIZES
2012: Winner of the Modepalast best of 10 Award
2011: Winner of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce Fashion Production Prize; AFA AWARDS
2011: Winner of the GREEN & CLEAN FASHION AWARD
PUBLIC ACQUISITIONS
2021: Purchase by the State of Styria, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Neue Galerie Graz
2019: Purchase by the Costume and Fashion Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
Various purchases by private art collectors.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artistic practice focuses on the transformation of discarded materials - textile remnants, historical artifacts, urban relics. These „drift materials“ carry visible traces of time, use, and history. Through a slow, craft-based process, I detach them from their original contexts and reconfigure them into new aesthetic and narrative constellations.
I am interested in the potential of what appears to be worthless. Cracks, discoloration, and signs of wear are deliberately preserved - not as flaws, but as carriers of memory, social history, and material experience. The acts of collecting, archiving, and reworking become a reflection on material cycles, shifting meanings, and our relationship to existing resources.
My work moves within the intersection of textile art, social material research, poetic object-making, and socially engaged design. It is shaped by a quiet engagement with the visible and the lost - offering fragile, contemplative invitations to perceive, remember, and reimagine.
- Photo: Klaus Fritsch
