On Saturday 28 January 2023, LABS Contemporary Art is pleased to present "Il segno traccia del nostro vissuto", a solo exhibition by Greta Schödl, curated by Silvia Evangelisti. The exhibition, organised as part of ART CITY Bologna 2023 on the occasion of ARTEFIERA, presents a selection of new works.

 

Born in Hollabrunn, Austria, in 1929, she moved to Bologna in the late 1950s. Active since the 1960s, she participated in the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978 and the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil in 1981. Her works can be found in various national and international collections as well as in several museums, including the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, MART in Rovereto, MAGA in Varese, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington (USA). Schödl has spent the last six decades honouring a visual language. Her work incorporates letters and symbols, rhythmically repeated until they become abstract. Geometrical shapes and bold signs are intertwined with words, illuminated with gold leaf and cast on different surfaces: pages of botanical books, maps, papers, leaves, pieces of marble, sheets, which carry memories of past existence. Through the combination of linguistic and visual representation, Schödl erases the original meaning of the words and objects he uses, imbuing them with a new significance. Her work challenges the social constructs of language and suggests alternative forms of expression and interpretation.

 

"My research is on the sign," said Greta in a recent interview. The sign as a moment of existential verification, thought that becomes a trace, and the artist's hand, like a seismograph, transmits on paper the internal sensations, emotions, memories, the history hidden under the surface of the world: elements that, from intermediaries between the idea and the sign, become a filter for the image and the mental path is transformed into a manual tracing, a place of reflection, of thought freed by the mind that dilates space and time, cancelling the boundaries of the defined (physical) field of the surface.

 

The spatial dimension, the place of the creative happening, then, dilates and multiplies, as in a musical score, in secret and extremely calibrated formal relationships that empty the word of its semantic meaning to make it a continuous flow of signs, so to speak, preverbal and common to all and to all cultures, going back to the alphabetical origin of language as the first instrument of perception and communication elaborated by men.