The artist Elisabeth Wild has died at her home in Guatemala, her publicist has announced, just weeks before her UK public art debut at the age of 98.
Wild’s new design for the spring edition of the pocket Tube map is to appear in May, under the aegis of Art on the Underground. It was commissioned in conjunction with a major new installation by her daughter, the artist Vivian Suter, which is due to be unveiled at Stratford tube station in June.
Born in Vienna in 1922, the only daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Wild fled with her family to Argentina as a teenager in the 1930s. She found work as a fabric designer before marrying the owner of a textile factory.
In the 1960s the family fled back to Europe to escape the dictatorship of Juan Perón, settling in Basel, Switzerland, where they set up a furniture shop. Wild applied her skills to buying and restoring old furniture, creating works of art out of each of them with her delicate paintings.
In 1996 she moved to Guatemala to live with Suter, who had set up home on the slopes of a volcano by Lake Atitlán. Together they staged one of the most remarkable comebacks of the new millennium, with Suter emerging after three decades in the wilderness, and bringing Wild with her.
Mother and daughter showed side by side in Athens at the 14th edition of Documenta in 2017, curated by their great champion Adam Szymczyk; at the Power Plant, Toronto in 2017; and at Sterna, at Nisyros in Greece the following year.
Wild had a solo show in Dubai in 2019 and is scheduled for a career retrospective at Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art in 2021. She featured in Rosalind Nashashibi’s film Vivian’s Garden, which was part of Nashashabi’s shortlisted 2017 Turner prize entry.
In her latter years, Wild specialised in bright, geometric collages assembled from magazines. Though she had been in failing health for several years, she continued to produce a collage every day until her death.
