Elisabeth Wild. Fantasías
In a monograph about the antiques dealer and artist Elisabeth Wild (1922–2020) from Basel, the design reacts to the work with strong gestures but without thrusting itself into the foreground. Wild moved to Guatemala in 2007 to live with her daughter and there, late in life, she created abstract, slightly misshapen and often brightly coloured collages using pieces cut from glossy magazines and pasted one on top of another. The book object references the cut-out technique at a first glance, as its light-blue cover and all of the pages are cut off at the right-hand edge. Meanwhile, the collage process is exemplified by an abstract title image made from a piece of pink paper pasted – most unusually – at a slight slant directly onto the book cover, without pre-embossing the respective area, so as to partially obscure some letters of the embossed title. With its matt colours, the cover design also makes for a fascinating contrast with the gaudy contents on high-gloss paper. In some of the illustrated essays, Wild’s slightly misshapen collages are randomly located unusually close to the text, just like the piece of paper on the cover. In between are numerous pages of pictures presenting between one and three works, often standing freely. The endpaper and a small number of pages are made of dark yellow paper and contain poems by the Guatemalan artist Negma Coy. Despite the richness of the material, the overall effect is light and playful.
