Greta Schödl on Her Second Biennale Appearance and Artistic Practice

Austrian-born artist Greta Schödl (Hollabrunn, 1929), now based in Bologna and represented by Galleria Richard Saltoun, is a featured artist at the 60th Venice Biennale 2024, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In an exclusive interview, she discusses her artistic research centered on the relationship between object and subject. Schödl uses found objects with pre-existing histories—marble, sheets, cardboard tubes, old book pages, handmade papers, leaves, and flowers—and inscribes them with Gothic script learned during her early schooling in Austria. By repeating words like mantras, she strips them of linguistic meaning, transforming them into visual poetry of golden light points within the letters' rounded spaces. She emphasizes that objects carry vibrations transmitted across people and generations, which is why she repurposes rather than discards them. Her preferred dimension in art is when viewers question themselves starting from her work. This is her second Biennale; her first was in 1978 with Mirella Bentivoglio. She notes that her current participation feels more mature and present, and she is very happy to exhibit in this edition curated by Pedrosa.