ART CITIES: Seoul-Vivian Suter
Born in Buenos Aires to exiled European parents four years after the end of World War II, Suter returned to Basel when she was thirteen, and it is to this city and its art scene that she stays connected. Nevertheless, it was on a trip through North and Central America in 1983 that she found love and so set down roots on the banks of Lake Atitlán. Since 2007 she has lived and worked there alongside her mother, artist Elisabeth Wild.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive
Vivian Suter presents her first exhibition in Seoul. Throughout her decades-long career, Suter has excelled in her singular style of installation in which mixed media paintings flood the gallery space, creating a surreal and immersive environment. For this exhibition, Suter has employed the gallery’s modern architecture to transpose elements of her tropical Guatemalan studio onto the urban setting of this Korean neighborhood space. Suter finds inspiration in Abstract Expressionism, color theory, and most of all, her natural surroundings. Based in Guatemala for the past thirty years, Suter frequently draws on the environment around her by gesturally referencing the sun, rain, wind, and trees throughout her work and tactically incorporating eroded dirt, animal life, rainwater, and plant matter 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. The installation continues the artist’s investigation of using the painted medium to create a three-dimensional experience. The walls, ceiling, stairwell, and floor all find activation through the unique placement of unstretched canvases that simultaneously highlight and conceit the rectilinear components of the exhibition space. While each work is created as an individual, their pairings and compositions in the gallery allow the paintings to continually and infinitely find new relevance and importance. This permission for recontextualization similarly democratizes Suter’s work for all viewers, allowing different permutations and transformations with each new installment of the artist’s paintings.
Photo: Vivian Suter, Installation view Gladstone Gallery-Seoul 2022, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Info: Gladstone Gallery, 760, Samseong-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, Duration: 15/7-19/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, www.gladstonegallery.com/
Right: Vivian Suter, Untitled, Undated, Mixed media on canvas, 101 1/2 x 68 7/8 inches (258 x 175 cm), © Vivian Suter, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Right: Vivian Suter, Untitled, Undated, Mixed media on canvas, 96 1/4 x 70 1/2 inches (244.5 x 179.1 cm), © Vivian Suter, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Right: Vivian Suter, Untitled, Undated, Mixed media on canvas, 94 1/2 x 70 7/8 inches (240 x 180 cm), © Vivian Suter, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Right: Vivian Suter, Untitled, Undated, Mixed media on canvas, 88 1/4 x 68 1/2 inches (224 x 174 cm), © Vivian Suter, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Right: Vivian Suter, Untitled, Undated, Mixed media on canvas, 84 3/4 x 69 5/8 inches (266 x 177 cm), © Vivian Suter, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery