Elisabeth Wild 1922–2020
/5
On February 12, we received this sad news: the artist Elisabeth Wild passed on at her home in Panajachel, Guatemala, just days after her 98th birthday. Some years earlier, she had penned down her short biographical note in Spanish, one of the languages she used daily.
"Naci en Vienna, Austria el 6 de febrero de 1922. En el ano 1939 emigre con mis padres Franz und Stefanie Pollak a la Argentina, Buenos Aires. Aprendi a pintar con un artista de la academia de arte de Vienna, Eichhorn. En el circulo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires dibuje desnudos con un maestro. Pude participar en exposiciones en Buenos Aires y Mar del Plata. Me ganaba mi vida haciendo dibujos textiles para imprimir sobre tela. Asi conoci a mi esposo August Wild de nacionalidad Suiza. Tuvimos una hija Vivian que nacio en 1949. 1962 nos trasladamos para vivir en Basel, Suiza. Alla mismo abri una tienda de Antiguedades en un edificio historico. 1996 me traslade a Guatemala, Panajachel para vivir con mi hija. Donde participe en exposiciones. Mis trabajos mas recientes son collages."
This is a modest story of Elizabeth Wild’s eventful life as told by herself in 2012 in thirteen condensed sentences. Her biography spans over the entire long 20th century, beginning in Vienna, in a Jewish wine merchants’ family that then managed to flee from the cradle of Nazism to Argentina, where she married a textile industrialist August Wild (she was then making living of textile design) and where their daughter, Vivian, was born. Following Adolf Eichmann’s capture in Argentina by MOSSAD in 1960, a fascist Tacuara Nationalist Movement was founded, responsible for anti-Semitic acts and bombings. In the political climate showing clear signs of what Elisabeth had experienced in Vienna thirty years before, the Wild family moved to Basel in 1962. An intrepid trans-Atlantic spirit, she later returned to Latin America to live with her daughter (who had settled in Guatemala in 1983) in the estate they built in Panajachel on the Lake of Atitlan. In the deceptively tranquil beauty of common living and working on the edge of tropical forest, mother and daughter were confronted with natural disasters and violence: hurricanes followed by mudslides damaged the estate and the ominous presence of local narcos threatened the villagers and gringos alike.
Elisabeth Wild’s work was important part of documenta 14 at both the Odeion Athinon and the Tea Pavilion on Filopappou Hill in Athens, as well as at the Neue Galerie in Kassel. Her collages were featured in 2014 under the title "Fantasías 2" in Vivian Suter’s exhibition titled "intrépida" at Kunsthalle Basel—installed on the wall painted, as she always requested, in the color of her choice—and most recently in “Wild Spoerri Rosenstein,” the exhibition of works by students of Adam Szymczyk’s seminar “The Principle of Equality” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in November 2019. During a research trip to Guatemala in April 2019, the students interviewed Wild extensively, learning about her life of continuous exile. Her and Vivian Suter’s hospitality were unsurpassed.
She was an artist who found her language and medium in collage at a relatively late stage in her career. Trained as painter in Buenos Aires, she made studies from nature and portraits. Her few extant early paintings have surrealist touch to them (she would return to the principle of montage of disparate realities in her later work). In Argentina, she also drew designs for textiles. She restored and modified antique furniture at her excellent antique shop in Basel, where she lived from 60s thru 90s. She moved again, to join her daughter in Panajachel, Guatemala in 2001, at the age of 79. There, she developed her daily practice of collage, which enabled her to get a lot of work done with little physical effort, with patience and determination.
Her work strikes the viewer as totally accessible at first, but when looking at her collages closer, one gets caught in the world that is hermetic. This world, however, is made of parts and pieces cut out from commercial imagery of glossy magazines that are perfectly from our world. Wild transformed images of commodity into witty, sometimes menacing images of another reality. If there can be a visual equivalent to labyrinths and cul-de-sacs of one person’s mind and memory, we can imagine such equivalence very well while looking at Elisabeth Wild’s collages. In her works, we get a sense of the way she understood and transformed the changing world that she was part of during her ninety-eight-year-long sojourn on this planet. Now she is somewhere else—probably making new work. Elisabeth was a friend and protective spirit in lives of many people and we will dearly miss her.
Adam Szymczyk
Adam Szymczyk is a curator and author. He was Artistic Director of documenta 14 and lives in Zurich.
February 2020
"Naci en Vienna, Austria el 6 de febrero de 1922. En el ano 1939 emigre con mis padres Franz und Stefanie Pollak a la Argentina, Buenos Aires. Aprendi a pintar con un artista de la academia de arte de Vienna, Eichhorn. En el circulo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires dibuje desnudos con un maestro. Pude participar en exposiciones en Buenos Aires y Mar del Plata. Me ganaba mi vida haciendo dibujos textiles para imprimir sobre tela. Asi conoci a mi esposo August Wild de nacionalidad Suiza. Tuvimos una hija Vivian que nacio en 1949. 1962 nos trasladamos para vivir en Basel, Suiza. Alla mismo abri una tienda de Antiguedades en un edificio historico. 1996 me traslade a Guatemala, Panajachel para vivir con mi hija. Donde participe en exposiciones. Mis trabajos mas recientes son collages."
This is a modest story of Elizabeth Wild’s eventful life as told by herself in 2012 in thirteen condensed sentences. Her biography spans over the entire long 20th century, beginning in Vienna, in a Jewish wine merchants’ family that then managed to flee from the cradle of Nazism to Argentina, where she married a textile industrialist August Wild (she was then making living of textile design) and where their daughter, Vivian, was born. Following Adolf Eichmann’s capture in Argentina by MOSSAD in 1960, a fascist Tacuara Nationalist Movement was founded, responsible for anti-Semitic acts and bombings. In the political climate showing clear signs of what Elisabeth had experienced in Vienna thirty years before, the Wild family moved to Basel in 1962. An intrepid trans-Atlantic spirit, she later returned to Latin America to live with her daughter (who had settled in Guatemala in 1983) in the estate they built in Panajachel on the Lake of Atitlan. In the deceptively tranquil beauty of common living and working on the edge of tropical forest, mother and daughter were confronted with natural disasters and violence: hurricanes followed by mudslides damaged the estate and the ominous presence of local narcos threatened the villagers and gringos alike.
Elisabeth Wild’s work was important part of documenta 14 at both the Odeion Athinon and the Tea Pavilion on Filopappou Hill in Athens, as well as at the Neue Galerie in Kassel. Her collages were featured in 2014 under the title "Fantasías 2" in Vivian Suter’s exhibition titled "intrépida" at Kunsthalle Basel—installed on the wall painted, as she always requested, in the color of her choice—and most recently in “Wild Spoerri Rosenstein,” the exhibition of works by students of Adam Szymczyk’s seminar “The Principle of Equality” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in November 2019. During a research trip to Guatemala in April 2019, the students interviewed Wild extensively, learning about her life of continuous exile. Her and Vivian Suter’s hospitality were unsurpassed.
She was an artist who found her language and medium in collage at a relatively late stage in her career. Trained as painter in Buenos Aires, she made studies from nature and portraits. Her few extant early paintings have surrealist touch to them (she would return to the principle of montage of disparate realities in her later work). In Argentina, she also drew designs for textiles. She restored and modified antique furniture at her excellent antique shop in Basel, where she lived from 60s thru 90s. She moved again, to join her daughter in Panajachel, Guatemala in 2001, at the age of 79. There, she developed her daily practice of collage, which enabled her to get a lot of work done with little physical effort, with patience and determination.
Her work strikes the viewer as totally accessible at first, but when looking at her collages closer, one gets caught in the world that is hermetic. This world, however, is made of parts and pieces cut out from commercial imagery of glossy magazines that are perfectly from our world. Wild transformed images of commodity into witty, sometimes menacing images of another reality. If there can be a visual equivalent to labyrinths and cul-de-sacs of one person’s mind and memory, we can imagine such equivalence very well while looking at Elisabeth Wild’s collages. In her works, we get a sense of the way she understood and transformed the changing world that she was part of during her ninety-eight-year-long sojourn on this planet. Now she is somewhere else—probably making new work. Elisabeth was a friend and protective spirit in lives of many people and we will dearly miss her.
Adam Szymczyk
Adam Szymczyk is a curator and author. He was Artistic Director of documenta 14 and lives in Zurich.
February 2020