Frieze Art Fair 2025: artist, Greta Schodl
represented by Richard Saltoun Gallery

Article by Cathy Breslaw

February 26, 2025

The recent 2025 Frieze Art Fair had more than 95 galleries from 20-plus countries with 40 percent of the galleries having a Los Angeles presence. Walking through the fair, as an artist and arts writer I was searching for ‘treasure’ – work that feels authentic to the artist’s practice, and that stops me in my tracks. So when I came upon the Richard Saltoun Gallery (Rome, London, New York) booth, I found myself in resonance with a fascinating solo body of work by artist Greta Schodl.

Born and raised in Vienna, since the 1960s she’s worked and resided in Bologna Italy. Her work, though not widely recognized, was included in the 38^th Venice Biennale in 1978, the 16th Bienal de São Paulo, and most recently in the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

As I inquired about her work, I learned that she has been making art for seven decades. Emerging in the 1950’s as a significant artist of Italy’s Visual Poetry movement, Schodl uses fine-point dark colored pens writing in the kurrent script style.  Using this old form of German language handwriting, Schodl often uses symbols, layered over various natural materials including transparent rice papers, hemp cloth and textiles, dried leaves, oil, chalk, india ink, and stone. Writing repetitively and obsessively, her selected words in Italian or German, are a kind of gesture and wholly appear as meditations. Schodl describes these gestures as 

“…very personal, each line traces our entire experience, like a fingerprint or wrinkle on the skin, with the meaning and perception of the word being subjective and unique for each person.”

Gold leaf is also used throughout the compositions. Influenced by Gustav Klimt and the Viennese Secession movement, Schodl has remarked that gold is “points of light” which depending on the viewpoint can shine or appear diminished. Placed judiciously within certain letters, bits of gold leaf form patterns throughout particular works almost like a form of punctuation – causing the viewer to pause and then return their eye to the rhythm of her mark-making.  The gold marks collectively seem to add a musical feel to the works. Others include geometric shapes and bold gestures that are sometimes intertwined with iron wires using handmade paper, books, personal letters, and maps. The fusion of these materials refer to the artist’s Austrian heritage and her ancestral past. 

Also included in the exhibition are a series of small Carrara marble sculptures, a material often associated with the classical ideas of beauty and permanence. Schodl uses chunks of them in raw form. Rather than carving and sculpting, she inscribes the forms with china ink and bits of gold leaf. She describes this approach as “clothing the surface with its name” as she hand-paints the marble with it’s Italian name “marmom” repeatedly adding gold leaf often placed within vowels of letters.

One additional notable work is La Scala (Serie VIBRAZIONOI), (c. 2014 Indian ink and crocheted gold thread on paper, bark 309 x 21 cm). Translated to English, La Scala means ladder – this very tall and narrow work is drawn in waves of  light and dark-toned thin black horizontal lines of variable lengths, repetitively drawn from top to bottom resembling an output we might imagine as earth’s seismic and oscillating vibrational rhythms.

Though Schodl’s work feels timeless, it is also created in the “moment” simultaneously.  The vibrations and rhythms produced by the writing are Schodl’s “fingerprint” which have universal appeal because they connect deeply to the human experience.

WORDS, WORDS
The word is a line which we give meaning to.
The name identifies.
The graphic is a garment of the self.
In my work I clothe the surface with its name.
The golden dots speak of my emotional rhythm.
It is a door open onto the poetry of living.
Greta Schödl

.