Elisabeth Wild's European Solo Debut at Karma International Zürich

Karma International in Zürich presents Elisabeth Wild's first European solo exhibition from September 12 to October 31. The show features her geometrically inclined papier collé works created in Guatemala, where she lived with her artist daughter Vivian Suter in Panajachel. Wild fled Vienna during Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria, escaping first to Argentina and later to Basel in 1962 before returning to South America in the mid-1990s. She died earlier this year at age ninety-eight. Curator Adam Szymczyk, who first championed Wild in a 2014 duo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, has arranged the untitled compositions as an orderly picture gallery on an aquamarine wall. The arrangements depict angular, quasi-abstract worlds where social housing flirts with postmodernism and carnivalesque brutalism prevails. Wild's collage technique involved snipping images from art, fashion, and architecture magazines, liberating glossy fragments from their original contexts. Her work offers glimpses of possible presents and futures through totemlike structures in populated landscapes. The exhibition layout resembles a calendar or surreal panorama, referencing Wild's practice of creating one work per day. The artist's aesthetic inadvertently aligns with hauntology, a concept popularized about fifteen years ago from Jacques Derrida's neologism, which sees collage as extracting spectral potential from past narratives.