Kunstmuseum Luzern

Vivian Suter has just been honoured by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC) with this year’s Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim. And a first retrospective exhibition is now on show at the Kunstmuseum Luzern featuring works ranging from her beginnings in Basel in the 1970s to today.

For almost 40 years Vivian Suter’s studio has been nature. She hangs her painted canvases out to dry and stores them under the dense canopy of leaves of the primeval forest. Foliage and earth are deposited on them and leave traces; her three dogs Bonzo, Tintin and Nina walk on the paintings as if there was no difference between Suter’s pictures and the vital ground of the for- est. Vivian Suter does not paint nature, she paints together with nature. Nature becomes an accomplice in the creative act and is given a voice that influences the shaping of the work. The two tropical storms Stan in 2005 and Agatha in 2010 were the catalysts for this development. Those storms destroyed some canvases, while leaving others to weather. The artist then began to integrate that weathering process into her work. Vivian Suter combines this conceptual ap- proach with the transposition of her subjective sensibility into painting.

is the first comprehensive exhibition of Vivian Suter’s works. On show will be early drawings, painterly wall reliefs from the 1980s and her latest airy installa- tions consisting of colourful, gesturally painted canvases, of which the Kunstmuseum Luzern has acquired a group for its collection. The visitors walk among the canvases, moving about in atmospherically dense surroundings and imagining they are in Suter’s studio or in the primeval forest. Vivian Suter’s works are being exhibited together with collages by her mother, Elisabeth Wild, with whom she lived in Guatemala until her death last year. The film by the artist Rosalind Nashashibi provides an impression of Suter’s lifeworld. The publication
(Hatje Cantz) will be issued to accompany the exhibition. It takes a close look at the artist’s diverse oeuvre with texts by Fanni Fetzer, César García-Alvarez, Roman Kurzmeyer, Anne Pontégnie und Adam Szymczyk.

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires in 1949 and has lived with her family in Basel since 1962. The artistic explorations she undertook on her travels were presented for the first time at Galerie Stampa in Basel. Her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1981 and the presentation of her work at the Kunstmuseum Thurgau – Kartause Ittingen, in 1983 elicited a great response. Then things quietened down around the Swiss artist, who emigrated to Guatemala and contin- ued her artistic work unnoticed for a long time by the art world. Since Vivian Suter took part in documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017 she has, as it were, been back on the art scene. Numerous exhi- bitions at prestigious international venues, most recently at the Museo Reine Sofia in Madrid in 2021, testify to an unbroken interest in Vivian Suter’s art as well as to its topicality.

Curator: Fanni Fetzer