Dominik Steiger

Viennese artist and writer (1940–2014) who, after breaking off studies in political science and Slavic studies, served in the French Foreign Legion before travelling through France, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India in the early 1960s. From the mid-1960s his work was shaped by exchanges with the Vienna Group—H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer, and Oswald Wiener—and a lasting friendship with Dieter Roth. His practice, which emerged fully in the 1970s, encompasses drawings, material pictures, prints, audio cassettes, and videos, centred on language as a system of signs in interaction with image, form, and sound. In 2004 he received Austria's Würdigungspreis für Literatur.