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Elisabeth Wild

Vienna,Austria1922

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Born in Vienna, Elisabeth Wild (1922–2020) escaped to Argentina during WWII with her parents. From a young age, Wild took painting classes and later worked in textile design before marrying textile industrialist August Wild in Buenos Aires. In 1962 the family left Juan Peron’s Argentina 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. At 75 years of age, Wild closed up her shop in Basel and moved to Panajachel, Guatemala, to live and work alongside her daughter Vivian Suter. Until her death at the age of 98, Wild was carefully crafting her light-hearted, joyous abstract worlds in collage, walking the line between construction and deconstruction. 

Wild is currently having on view her first career retrospective at the mumok museum (Vienna, 2023). She has exhibited institutionally at Kunsthalle Basel (Basel); Museo Tamayo (Mexico City); Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (San José); NuMu (Guatemala City); documenta14 (Athens and Kassel), The Power Plant (Toronto); Brücke Museum (Berlin); and The Art Institute (Chicago), who acquired a large group of her works. Wild’s first monograph (edited by Adam Szymczyk) was published in 2020 by Sternberg Press. Her second monograph was published by mumok on the occasion of her exhibition Imagination Factory in Vienna.

Exhibitions by Elisabeth Wild at Proyectos Ultravioleta: