Vivian Suter

Vivian Suter (born 1949 in Buenos Aires; lives in Panajachel, Guatemala) comes from a family of artists. Her great-grandmother was an artist, as was her mother. Her mother painted throughout Vivian’s childhood. Until the age of 13, Suter lived with her family in Argentina. She later moved to Switzerland, where she graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, attending painting classes and also studying sculpture, colour and creative writing. She held her first exhibition in 1972 at Galerie Stampa in Basel. In 1981, the same year she received a Federal Art Scholarship, she was invited by Jean-Christophe Ammann, then director of Kunsthalle Basel, to present a solo exhibition.

When Suter left Switzerland in 1983, the art world struggled to understand her decision to live in isolation, and she was largely forgotten. It took some time before she was rediscovered. In 2014, at the invitation of curator Adam Szymczyk, she returned to both the pictorial surface and Kunsthalle Basel: in the solo exhibition “Vivian Suter intrépida featuring Elisabeth Wild Fantasías 2”, she presented works from the preceding three decades alongside selected collages by Elisabeth Wild. Szymczyk also included her in Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens—45 years after her first visit to Documenta. Until then, Suter had worked far from the art world, on a former coffee plantation in Guatemala, refining her artistic language in complete independence from external influences. In this isolation, she developed a distinctive visual vocabulary in which the conditions of creation are embedded.

Nature has always been Suter’s studio, and the particularities of this working environment are evident in her exhibitions, where paintings—mounted or suspended—come together like elements of a vast textile sculpture. Entering such installations becomes an immersive experience, evoking the sensation of travelling far away and encountering the density of the rainforest.

Suter’s exceptional work is being honoured with two major solo exhibitions this year: in June at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and in November with “Vivian Suter Retrospective” at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.