Greta Schödl
Main exhibition, 60th Biennale di Venezia
20 April – 24 November 2024
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the title Foreigners Everywhere, the main exhibition of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2024 explores the concept of the outsider. “Wherever you go, you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere," Pedrosa has explained. "No matter where you find yourself, you are always, truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.” The title is drawn from a series of works begun in 2004 by the artist collective Claire Fontaine that produced sculptures featuring the words “Foreigners Everywhere” in different languages. That phrase in turn references the work of a Turin-based collective titled Stranieri Ovunque who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s.
Artist Greta Schödl has been selected by Pedrosa to participate in the main exhibition of the Biennale in 2024.
Schödl (born 1929 in Hollabrunn, Austria) studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna (today die Angewandte), graduating in 1953. She moved permanently to Italy six years later, establishing a studio in Bologna. After taking a pause from her work to raise a family, she returned to making art in the mid-1960s and has since exhibited widely in institutions around the world. Today she is considered one of the most significant female artists working in the field of 'poesia visiva' (visual poetry).
In her works, Schödl arranges letters and symbols in geometric forms and obsessively repeats them until they are rendered virtually abstract. As a surface, she has used stone, handmade paper, books, maps, personal letters, and household objects such as ironing boards, pillowcases and bed sheets. Through the combination of language and image, Schödl erases the original function of words and objects and imbues them with new meaning.
She exhibited at the 38th Biennale di Venezia in 1978 and the 16th Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil, and her works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., USA; and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami, USA.
This is Schödl’s first collaboration with Phileas.
