The studio of the painter Vivian Suter, born in Buenos Aires in 1949, is located a long way from the usual art centers, on the site of a disused coffee plantation near the town of Panajachel on Lake Atitlán in southwest Guatemala. The fact that art lovers, curators and museum people around the world have been interested in Suter’s work for some time despite this remote location is probably due to the curator Adam Szymczyk. In 2017 he invited Suter, who was largely unknown at the time, together with her mother Elisabeth Wild (1922-2020), who was also an artist, to Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, thereby attracting great international attention to Suter’s work – from which many other exhibition projects followed . The Kunstmuseum Luzern is now dedicating a retrospective to her.
Vivian Suter spent her childhood in Argentina, came to Switzerland at the age of 13, studied art in Basel in the early 1970s, before leaving Europe again in the mid-1980s. Her working style is variable: sometimes she works on the floor of her studio, sometimes on the wall. Sometimes she takes her large-format canvases outside and leans the frame against a tree while she applies her isinglass thickened oil and acrylic paints to the surface.
Vivian Suter in her studio in Panajachel, Guatemala.
(Photo: Flavio Karrer)
Suter’s curved, gestural paintings seem to follow natural forms, such as the spherical shape of a fruit pod, the tangle of aerial roots or a dog’s head. Then again the pictures are poured out and appear as if they were themselves connected in a mysterious way to the water and nutrient cycles of the forest. The earthy appearance is not only due to the colors, it is partially underlined by small leaves or branches that stick to some canvases. Elsewhere there are paw prints made by Suter’s dogs. The environment leaves its mark on art, which in turn reflects the artist’s close bond with animals and plants.
The audience has to find their own way through the thicket of colors and shapes
In her exhibitions, the painter hangs her pictures on the walls, freed from the stretcher and overlapping each other, or just fixed on a wooden strip at different heights in the middle of the room. There is also a pile of canvases on the floor somewhere. This creates a kind of loose, anti-hierarchical thicket of colors and shapes through which the exhibition audience has to find their own way. It is not the individual picture, but the multitude of pictures that make Suter’s art an experience. In the first room of the Suter exhibition in Lucerne alone, visitors are literally surrounded by 220 canvases.
“I would like to show my work, not talk about it,” says Suter to this day. But sometimes she does express herself, as she did recently when she was awarded the renowned Swiss Meret Oppenheim Prize endowed with 40,000 francs: “My mindset is like a kind of meditation, I maintain an osmotic relationship with nature that changes constantly changed. I think this interaction is also visible in my work. ” The question of natural aesthetics in the Anthropocene, the age of man, has been growing in the art business for several years. Suter’s canvases seem to be profoundly interwoven with all the ecology and climate discourses, life with natural disasters, questions about alternative future life and work plans or the changing human-animal relationships. That makes this art very contemporary.
The culture and congress center in Lucerne, a multifunctional building made of glass and steel according to plans by Jean Nouvel, opened at the end of the 1990s, with its cool techno affinity almost looks like a built counter-thesis to the organically curved ecological art of Suter, which is inside the building will be shown. On the other hand, there are the nested exhibition rooms, which do not allow the show to be walked in a straight line. That fits in well with the tortuous career of the artist herself, who followed her very own pattern.
Suter throws earth at her paintings, buries them or leaves them standing in the rain
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Fanni Fetzer, the exhibition curator and Lucerne museum director, did without a chronological retrospective. Instead, she staged a sequence of rooms that enables the audience to understand Suter’s entire oeuvre from its beginnings in the 1970s to the present day as a sequence of spatial scenes. Even without a chronological order, it becomes clear how the painter has shed more and more ballast over the decades, moving from conceptual beginnings to a heavy, impasto painting style in the eighties to an art of open surfaces characterized by touching lightness, which for her today’s work is characteristic.
For Suter, nature is not just an inspiration or theory, it also paved its way into artistic history in a very real way. When a hurricane swept across Guatemala in autumn 2005, rainwater and mud rolled through Suter’s studio with destructive force. During the clean-up work, the artist thought a large part of her work had been destroyed. But the pictures had survived under the muddy crust. Only in a different form. As if they had started a life of their own.
The artist finally accepted the effects of the weather on her art, and her work took a new direction. Since then she has been producing her pictures in and with nature. “When I work on a painting, I leave it outside, then come back and change it, maybe pelt it with soil or it rains. Then I either leave it like that or decide to add another color. It happens a lot Intuitive. Sometimes I bury the pictures so they can get in touch with the earth and then dig them up again. Once I even forgot I had buried a few pictures and when we found them later they were rotten. ” Art that can be recycled, that is, that does not necessarily claim to be eternal, is still a provocative idea for today’s museum world, which continues to count preservation as one of its core tasks. But Suter’s work certainly offers space for such speculations, which are also occupied by many younger artists. Seen in this light, this retrospective has a rather forward-looking character.
Vivian Suter. Retrospective. Lucerne Art Museum. Until February 13th. The publication accompanying the exhibition, “Bonzo, Tintin & Nina”, costs 50 francs.