Fantasías
Elisabeth Wild
Sternberg Press
English
Hardcover
152 pages
230 x 170 mm
2020
ISBN 9783956795794
This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild’s kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages. Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, Wild composes a dimensionless reality that is witty yet menacing, ancient yet immortal. Imagining figures that are structural and anatomical, her work presents a shimmering dream logic. Wooden totems and stone altars, woven rugs and precious stones are the cosmic architectural inhabitants that unveil the artist’s fantasies.
Wild began her prolific collage production in her seventies while living in Basel shortly before she moved to Guatemala—another in a series of significant transatlantic crossings undertaken in her life. In 1938, at the age of sixteen, her family fled Vienna to Buenos Aires to escape the Nazi threat. She continued her fine-art studies in her new home, later working as a textile designer. In 1962, Wild and her family traveled back across the Atlantic, to Basel, to escape the Perón dictatorship. There she ran an antique shop. In 1996, she left for Panajachel, Guatemala, where she lived with her daughter, the artist Vivian Suter, and continued working on her collages until her death in 2020.
Along with Wild’s collages, this publication includes contributions by poet Negma Coy, curator Adam Szymczyk, art educator and writer Barbara Casavecchia, art historian and critic Noit Banai, and gallerist Karolina Dankow of Karma International, all which frame the importance of this singular artist’s work and life.
(source: https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/fantasias/)
About the Artist
Elisabeth Wild (b. Austria,1922–2020) fled to Argentina during WWII with her parents. In 1962 the family escaped the regime of Juan Peron and found a new home in Basel, Switzerland. Wild opened an antique shop at St. Johannstor which became the outlet for her creativity at the time and also supported her and her family financially. Until her death at the age of 98, Wild was carefully crafting her light-hearted, joyous abstract worlds walking the line between construction and deconstruction.
(source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elisabeth-wild)
About the Publisher
Sternberg Press grew out of the small publishing house known as Lukas & Sternberg, founded in 1999 by Caroline Schneider. With a focus on art criticism, theory, fiction, and artists’ books, the Berlin-New York based publishing endeavor was set in motion with a pocket book series—edited in part with Nicolaus Schafhausen. Dedicated to an expanded notion of writing on art, Sternberg Press has created a formidable platform in which practitioners from the fields of art and culture (architecture, design, film, politics, literature, and philosophy) can engage in a critical discourse. Each book is a special object celebrating creative publishing at its best, based on both meticulous editorial decisions and distinctive design. Through both commissioned and translated works, Sternberg Press seeks out the blind spots within contemporary discourse and offers a timely response to the related debates.
sternberg-press.com
(source: https://www.sternberg-press.com/about/)
