Chilean poet and visual artist, born in 1927 in Río Loa, in the Atacama Desert, died in 2019 in Mexico.
Life
The son of an immigrant employed in the mines of northern Chile, Ludwig Zeller was first shaped by German Romanticism, which he studied and translated from the age of twenty; he published Las grandes elegías de Friedrich Hölderlin with the university press in Santiago. From 1952 to 1968 he ran the gallery of the Ministry of Education. In the 1960s he also worked at the Centre for Medical Anthropology of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile.
In Buenos Aires he met the poets of Argentine Surrealism. With his wife, the artist Susana Wald, he founded the review Casa de la Luna in Santiago and, at the end of the 1960s, organised the exhibition Surrealismo en Chile. In 1971 the couple moved to Toronto with three of their four children; there Zeller set about founding Oasis Publications. In France he was in contact with the Phases movement. The family later left for Mexico and settled in Oaxaca, where he lived until his death. His archive is held at Library and Archives Canada.
The work
For Zeller, poetry and image are inseparable. Collage accompanies his entire career, from two collage murals made in 1955 and 1957, now destroyed, to the Oaxaca years, when he devoted himself to it more fully. His books are often objects: Paloma que se sueña (1960) is printed on paper folded into the shape of a dove; Las reglas del juego (1968) appeared in Spanish, English, German and French. The video poem The Alchemical Body (1986), in which his collages and Susana Wald’s paintings are projected onto a naked body, was shown at the 42nd Venice Biennale.
Exhibitions and collections
- 42nd Venice Biennale, with The Alchemical Body.
- Library and Archives Canada: Ludwig Zeller fonds.
- “At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty”, section “Édouard Jaguer and the international Phases movement”, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 25 October to 30 November 2024.