Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Swiss-born artist Amalia de Schulthess spent much of her adult life in California and New Mexico. She grew up in Thurgau, Switzerland in a family of art collectors and patrons (artist Paul Klee was a frequent guest in their home) and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich. After immigrating to the United States in 1941, she met Piet Mondrian, who encouraged her to continue pursuing her career as an artist, as she recalled: "I visited him several times and we corresponded via letters. He encouraged me to paint and gave me many good ideas as to exercises in painting that could prove helpful to my technique."

In the 1960s, de Schulthess’s focus moved from painting toward sculpture, leading her to move to Italy for a decade where she lived and worked in Pietrasanta, not far from the famed Carrara marble quarries. She moved back to California and continued sculpting well into her nineties, creating an arresting body of avant-garde, modernist yet timeless work. De Schulthess was honored with a retrospective of her oeuvre at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1976 and exhibited extensively in France and California, including at the Salon de la jeune sculpture, Paris.