Elisabeth Wild 1944-2020

Exhibitions
Works
Overview
Elisabeth Wild (1922 - 2020) was born in Vienna, Austria and died in Panajachel, Guatemala. Through her small-scale collages she crafted wonderfully modern visions with harmonic compositions and an architectural sense of space.
Born in Austria, Wild fled to Argentina during WWII with her parents. As a young girl she took painting classes in Vienna such as in Buenos Aires and later worked in textile design before she married the textile industrialist August Wild. 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. In 2007 Wild joined her daughter Vivian Suter in the remote Guatemalan village of Panajachel. Though she worked in various media throughout her lifetime, Wild’s early work in textiles was a precursor to the collage she settled into later in life and adds a layer of explanation to the almost-quilted cohesion of these works.
Biography
Up 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. Alongside her daughter Elisabeth Wild has exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel, documenta 14, and the Powerplant in Toronto. A large body of her works has been acquired and exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021 she will have a retrospective at mumok, Vienna.