I was in Chelsea this afternoon and went into the Gladstone Gallery. In this gallery was Vivian Suter’s work. When I sat down to write an artist post, she kept popping in my head.
Vivian Suter’s exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery is a beautiful instillation of abstract paintings on unstretched canvas. When walking into the gallery, you might even hit your head on a canvas, for everything is hung at different heights. There are also canvases on the floor, the walls, everywhere. These paintings are inspired from the Guatamala rainforest, where she spent a lot of her time as an early adult. Clearly the colors of this place inspired her a lot but also the organic shapes of nature are shown in her artwork. The way she set it up was like a rainforest. She literally brought you into a different world.
Vivian’s Website: http://viviansuter.com/en/
Gladstone Gallery website: https://gladstonegallery.com/
Vivian’s Bio from her website:
Vivian Suter was born in 1949 in Buenos Aires. She has painted in Basel, Vienna, Africa, Bern, Rome and Panajachel, and has lived in Panajachel, Guatemala, since 1982.
Panajachel
Travelling through North and Central America in 1982, Vivian Suter arrived in Panajachel — a village on the Atitlan Lake — and stayed on, making her home on the grounds of a former coffee plantation. Since the early 1980s, most of her artistic works have been created against this backdrop, and many have become a part of it.
The gravilea, avocado and mango trees, originally planted to protect the coffee plants, immerse the area in their green shade all year round. A steep walkway, half steps, half mountain path, leads up to Vivian Suter’s studio, which looks out over the tips of the treetops down to the village of Panajachel with its lake and volcanoes.
The artistic works created up there are about the wind, the rain, the volcanoes, and the vastness and clarity of the tropical landscape.
Down below, in the shadow of the coffee plantation, is a second studio. The view through the open gables reaches no further than the leaves of the banana plants growing densely in front of the house. That’s where the close-ups are created: the ever-repeating motif of the forbidden fruit, the gaze turned on oneself or within.
Vivian Suter’s pictures and the photographic works and paper sketches she creates alongside them are depictions, commentaries and interpretations of her outer and inner surroundings. But they are also appropriations of these. They appropriate themselves to their surroundings, and in turn are appropriated by these very surroundings.
In Vivian Suter’s unsettled life there has always been one constant feature: her art. Wherever she is, there will be a place where she creates new work and is surrounded by the pieces she has created so far.
