ART-PREVIEW:Vivian Suter-Wolf’s Hour

Vivian Suter works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. Over thirty years Suter has been living and working on a former coffee plantage in the remote village of Panajachel, Guatemala. Painted en plein air, Suter’s sprawling abstract paintings capture the pulsating lush garden and the landscapes surrounding it.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Vivian Suter in her solo exhibition “Wolf’s Hour” presents mixed media paintings from more than thirty years of the artist’s career. This exhibition is Suter’s her first in Belgium.  Expanding the artist’s investigation of using the painted medium to create surreal, immersive environments, Suter employs the gallery’s classic architecture to transpose elements of her tropical studio onto the urban setting of this Belgian townhouse. The walls, ceiling, stairwell, and floor all find activation through the unique installation of unstretched canvases that simultaneously highlight and conceal the rectilinear components of the exhibition space. While conceived and created as unique, individual works, each painting on view is part and parcel with Suter’s artistic macrocosm, in which compositions find infinitely new relevance depending on their placement over, alongside, across, and underneath one another. This permission for recontextualization similarly democratizes Suter’s work for all viewers, allowing for different permutations and transformations with each new installation of the artist’s paintings. A testament to Suter’s decades-long career, these paintings run the canonical gamut, from Abstract Expressionist to Color Field to Art Informel. However, eschewing any artistic predecessors, Suter draws her inspiration directly from her natural surroundings, most deeply the Guatemalan rainforest where the artist has lived and worked for more than thirty years. The visual manifestation of this environmental stimulus is manifold: not only does Suter gesturally reference the sun, rainstorms, wind, and trees throughout her paintings, but eroded dirt, animal life, rain water, and plant matter also find their way onto the untreated surfaces of her canvases. A disruption of material hierarchy, Suter places the components of her studio on equal footing with the biological world. In keeping with the elemental construction of her paintings, Suter similarly eliminates any pecking order concerning the architecture of the gallery space. The walls, floor, and ceiling all receive equal billing on the artist’s stage. Through this elision of surface, Suter transposes the experience of viewing art into an immersive adventure, in which paintings are invariably (re)contextualized based on their placement over, alongside, under, and across from one another. All undated, each canvas on view is part of Suter’s far-reaching ecosystem, a network of compositions that visually and physically display the abstracted story of their creation.

Photo: Installation View of Vivian Suter, “Tintin’s Sofa” at Camden Arts Centre, 2020, Photo: Luke Walker, © Camden Arts Centre

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 12 Rue de Grand Cerf, Brussels, Duration: 11/3-30/4/2021, Days & Hours: tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com