LISBON — Vivian Suter is a type of uncommon artists who has been mythologized inside her personal lifetime. A way of romance imbues her biography: As a younger girl touring solo to see the archaeological websites of Mesoamerica, she occurred upon the small Guatemalan city of Panajachel on the shores of Lake Atitlan, and determined to remain. She left behind her life and the artwork world in Switzerland, the place she was raised, and created a brand new dwelling for herself on a former espresso plantation.
Because the curatorial textual content accompanying Suter’s solo present Disco on the Museum of Artwork, Structure and Know-how (MAAT) states, in Guatemala she pursued her “experimental, solitary, and obsessive practice” with a single-mindedness that disregarded the fluctuating traits of the artwork market. In some methods, this can be a conveniently interesting narrative that maybe skates over her experiences of marriage and child-rearing and likewise her rare however constant contact with Swiss artwork gallerists and festivals. However, the important thing a part of her story, which comes by powerfully in Disco, is her love for and immersion in her extraordinary surroundings.
Set up view of Vivian Suter: Disco at MAAT, Lisbon
Portray onto stretched canvases, Suter works outdoor in her backyard studio, surrounded by lush vegetation and topic to the vagaries of climate and temperature. After a portray is full, she removes the canvas from its stretcher, in some instances bringing it inside instantly, in others leaving it outdoors for days or perhaps weeks. Throughout this time, the works decide up traces of their surroundings; the paint turns into embedded with dried leaves, flecks of earth, or the muddy footprints of her three canines. These are collaborative artworks, produced in coalition with the ecologies of the place that Suter has chosen as her dwelling.
This exhibition options greater than 500 work produced during the last 10 years, introduced in a approach that evokes forest vegetation — nearly completely protecting the partitions in addition to hanging from the ceiling and even carpeting the ground like fallen leaves. Suter is desirous about undoing the hierarchies which have come to outline portray as a medium. She hangs her work sideways, the wrong way up, or again to entrance in keeping with her instincts throughout set up; in a number of items, drip marks disconcertingly run upward. Many works are displayed on racks impressed by these she makes use of to retailer her works at dwelling, hanging shut collectively in parallel in order that viewers should examine them slantwise, creating visible obstructions each time a brand new sightline opens up.
Set up view of Vivian Suter: Disco at MAAT, Lisbon
Throughout her oeuvre, Suter employs an expressive visible language of abstraction, by which painterly gestures are wealthy with allusions and associations. She by no means indicators, dates, or titles her works, which speaks to the facility of conjecture; the shapes of vegetation, topographical markers, or the curves of a human physique can coexist inside the identical canvas. For example, one piece seems to evoke the define of a child, but it surely is also learn as a germinating seed. In one other, gestural concentric circles counsel ripples in a lake or a setting solar, whereas the underside half of the canvas is muddied and frayed, the results of a devastating storm that flooded her storeroom. The fluidity of her method and mark-making conveys an ecological sensitivity to the interconnections between individuals and place, and an consciousness of the inextricable hyperlinks between human and nonhuman entities.
Each Suter and her work stay tantalizingly enigmatic, refusing to be defined away, shunning clear-cut analyses in favor of a apply that’s each conceptually rigorous and generously open-ended. The exhibition’s huge scale is countered by the humility of the title — Disco is her youngest canine. It’s a testomony to the generative potential of interspecies relationships.
Set up view of Vivian Suter: Disco at MAAT, Lisbon
Element of particles on a portray.
Set up view of Vivian Suter: Disco at MAAT, Lisbon
Set up view of Vivian Suter: Disco at MAAT, Lisbon (picture Pedro Pina) 
Set up view of Vivian Suter: Disco at MAAT, Lisbon (picture Pedro Pina)
Vivian Suter: Disco continues on the Museum of Artwork, Structure and Know-how (Av. Brasília, 1300-598, Lisbon, Portugal) by March 17, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Sérgio Mah.
Editor’s Notice: Some journey for the writer was paid for by MAAT.
