ExhibitionJuly 23, 2021
Vivian Suter
From June 22, 2021, to May 2, 2022, you can visit the exhibition "Vivian Suter" at the Palacio de Velázquez (Madrid, Spain).
During her artistic career, Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, 1949) has remained close to the art scene in Basel. In this city, she lived between 1962 and 1982 until she established her permanent residence in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle after a solo trip through the ruins of Mesoamerica. In her studio located in Panajachel, on the grounds of a former coffee plantation next to Lake Atitlán, Suter's work has evolved towards an increasingly close exchange with the natural environment, captured on unframed canvases, in profound continuity with the tropical landscape around her studio.
This relationship becomes more organic and processual after the tropical storms Stan, in 2005, and Agatha, in 2010: many of her canvases are partially submerged in mud, generating pictorial series terminated by the randomness of nature. From that moment on, nature will intervene almost as co-author of her works, which move between the introspection of the interior of her studio and the exterior, where they are impregnated by wind, rain, mud, small organisms of the jungle environment, dust motes slip in, or the paw prints of her dogs are printed. In this sense, her work "has a lot of autobiography but in the sense of life and reflects her relationship with nature," says Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofia.
Each canvas maintains its own autonomy as a work of art and remains in close connection with the rest of the works, in a kind of evocative ecosystem of climatic, sensory, and emotional experiences. In this sense, Suter's canvases hang unframed in installations that seek a close relationship with the architectural and natural space, while at the same time, they inevitably refer to the environment in which they were created.
During her artistic career, Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, 1949) has remained close to the art scene in Basel. In this city, she lived between 1962 and 1982 until she established her permanent residence in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle after a solo trip through the ruins of Mesoamerica. In her studio located in Panajachel, on the grounds of a former coffee plantation next to Lake Atitlán, Suter's work has evolved towards an increasingly close exchange with the natural environment, captured on unframed canvases, in profound continuity with the tropical landscape around her studio.
This relationship becomes more organic and processual after the tropical storms Stan, in 2005, and Agatha, in 2010: many of her canvases are partially submerged in mud, generating pictorial series terminated by the randomness of nature. From that moment on, nature will intervene almost as co-author of her works, which move between the introspection of the interior of her studio and the exterior, where they are impregnated by wind, rain, mud, small organisms of the jungle environment, dust motes slip in, or the paw prints of her dogs are printed. In this sense, her work "has a lot of autobiography but in the sense of life and reflects her relationship with nature," says Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofia.
Each canvas maintains its own autonomy as a work of art and remains in close connection with the rest of the works, in a kind of evocative ecosystem of climatic, sensory, and emotional experiences. In this sense, Suter's canvases hang unframed in installations that seek a close relationship with the architectural and natural space, while at the same time, they inevitably refer to the environment in which they were created.
