Lavishly illustrated, this publication on the Argentine-Swiss artist Vivian Suter offers an immersive approach to her acclaimed painting practice, whose relationship with the natural world makes it particularly challenging.
Vivian Suter's gestural works are the result of a daily, physical and emotional relationship with the materials and the contingencies of nature in the subtropical ecosystem where she lives and works. Rain, earth, humidity, light, flora, and fauna often inhabit her unstretched canvases, expressing her close interaction with external factors and her break with the traditional notion of controlling authorship, to create a versatile and monumental body of work, visually incomparable—an ode to the possibilities of painting.
Published to accompany the artist's survey exhibitions at MAAT, Lisbon, and
Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2024–2025, the volume includes two essays by the shows' curators Sérgio Mah and François Piron underlining the specificity of her art, an extensive selection of 200+ recent works, a commissioned portfolio documenting the activity in Suter's studio in Panajachel (Guatemala) where she settled in 1982, as well as a selection of exhibition views underlining her unique approach to exhibition making. Furthermore, poetic texts (songs, aphorisms, free prose) written by the artist are scattered throughout the 320-page volume.
Vivian Suter was born in 1949 in Buenos Aires to exiled European parents—her father owned a textile printing plant in Buenos Aires, while her mother,
Elisabeth Wild, was an artist. When she was 12, during the Peron regime, her family relocated to Basel, Switzerland, where she studied painting. In 1982, shortly after her first major group exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, she visited Latin America, and the following year, she settled in Panajachel, Guatemala, near the Lake Atitlán. The local atmosphere, climate, vegetation, and animals became central themes in her work. Vivian Suter's works, painted on stretched manta and exhibited unstretched, remain untitled and undated. Traces of rain, mud, leaves and also the remnants left by her dogs—Bonzo, Tintin, Nina and Disco—footprints contribute to the organic and lively quality of the paintings. When exhibited, her paintings are often overlapping, suspended and moving with the wind, air currents or the movements of visitors.
Her most notable exhibitions include: Kunstmuseum Olten, 2004; Kunsthalle Basel, 2014; São Paulo Biennial, 2014; documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, 2017; Power Plant, Toronto, 2018; the Art Institute of Chicago, 2019; Camden Art Centre, London, 2020; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2021; Secession, Vienna, 2023. Vivian Suter's works are included in renowned collections like the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, among others.
