FROM KOLAJ 21
Elisabeth Wild’s Collages
Elisabeth Wild is a ninety-five-year-old artist whose rich biography spans historical upheavals and vastly different geographies. It begins in 1922 Vienna, where she was born to a family of Jewish wine merchants that managed to flee the Nazis for Argentina. There, she worked in textile design, married textile industrialist August Wild, and had her daughter Vivian, who would become a painter. Due to the political climate during Juan Perón’s right-wing regime, the family moved to Basel in 1962. In 1996, she returned with her daughter to Latin America, to live in Guatemala–a remote location at the edge of a tropical forest in Panajachel, by Lake Atitlán. In 2017, Adam Szymczyk, Documenta 14 artistic director, featured forty of Wild’s new collages in the prestigious international art event. Etty Yaniv profiles this fascinating artist in Kolaj #21.
This article appears in KOLAJ #21. To see the entire article, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Get a Copy of the Issue.
Elisabeth Wild’s collages emanate a sense of vibrant interior spaces charged with unsettling dualities–movement and stasis, off balance and equilibrium, contemporary and timeless. In her collages, Wild deconstructs a wide range of imagery, from alluring fashion ads to chic decor, mechanical parts to natural elements–disconnecting these fragmented images from their familiar iconography and transforming them into new visual entities.
This article appears in KOLAJ #21. To see the entire article, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Get a Copy of the Issue.
A selection of forty of Elisabeth Wild’s collage from her “Fantasias” series was shown at Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, with additional collages from the same series on display at Documenta 14’s Athens location, 8 April-17 September 2017. Learn more at www.documenta14.de.
Images:
(top)
untitled collage by Elisabeth Wild
(centre)
Elisabeth Wild “Fantasias” series at Documenta 14 (installation view)