About the Exhibition.

The daughter of European immigrants who arrived in Argentina in the late 1930’s, Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires in 1949. In 1962 she returned to Europe where she spent a majority of her youth living in Basel, Switzerland, until 1983 when during a trip across North and Central America that included a brief stay in LA, she arrived in Panajachel—a small town on the northeastern shore of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán that she has since then called home. Suter built a home and studio on a lush terrain that was formerly a coffee plantation and it was here that she began to create works that resulted from her immediate experiences within the landscape. Suter’s exhibition at TMR encompasses an immersive installation inclusive of unstretched canvases, works on paper, floor pieces, and a hanging canopy of draping works that have come to anchor Suter’s oeuvre. Often deemed a landscape painter, Suter’s works in reality have shaped a unique genre of art-making altogether—one that negates the preciousness of the singular object and presents us with a recollection of vanishing images, surreal pictures, saturated stains, and forgotten objects that contemplate the space between our perceptions of nature and its actual realities. As a prologue to the exhibition, an installation of small collages by Vivian’s mother, artist Elisabeth Wild, is installed in the lobby area of the exhibition space—highlighting an intergenerational dialogue at the center of these two artists’ practices.