Vivian Suter

Courtesy of Vivian Suter and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels 

‘It is perhaps pertinent for us to think of Suter’s work as a kind of psychic embrace between nature and artist, in which both operate as co-authors of the paintings […] In their intermingling on the surface of her canvases, the paintings point to the precarity of human dominion over nature, offering Suter’s give-and-take relationship with her garden as a blueprint for how we might live with the planet.’ — Oliver Basciano, ArtReview 

Born in Buenos Aires in 1949 to exiled European parents, Suter was later raised in Basel, Switzerland where she studied painting. Shortly after her first big group exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel In 1981, she left Europe for Guatemala where she has lived since. Suter’s pieces, painted on stretched manta and exhibited unstretched, remain untitled and not categorized by a year. Traces of rain, mud, leaves and paw prints ad to the organic, lively quality of the paintings which are quietly yet relentlessly documenting ephemeral moments of energy in nature. These ideas are intensified in the presentation of the works, often overlapping, suspended and moving in the wind Suters installations capture the ecosystem and spirit of her surroundings.

Alongside her mother, Austrian artist Elisabeth Wild, who lived with her in Guatemala in the past years until her death, Suter exhibited at documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. She has had solo exhibitions at the Tate Liverpool, ICA Boston, Camden Art Centre, London, Jewish Museum, New York was featured in the 11th Taipei Biennial, Taiwan, on the High Line, New York, as well as in group shows at the Museum of Replica Handbags s, Boston, Museo Tamayo, Mexico, amongst others.

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