Fantasias

This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild’s kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages. Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, moreWild 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.