BRUSSELS.- Gladstone Gallery is presenting “Vivian Suter: Wolf’s Hour,” an exhibition of mixed media paintings from more than thirty years of the artist’s career. This show is Suter’s second presentation with Gladstone Gallery, and 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.
Since the mid-1980s, Suter’s home and studio has been based in the lush climate of the Guatemalan lowlands. Abstracted components of the artist’s surroundings find their way onto the untreated canvases, both figuratively and literally: painterly references to natural forms such as tree canopies, volcanic peaks, and placid lakes exist in company with gestural markings from rain water, eroded soil, and animal tracks. Suter’s admission of natural phenomena into her oeuvre not only undercuts the notion of a material hierarchy, but also offers an ecologically conscious form of existence, with the biological world acting in tandem with the artist’s hand.
Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; studied in Basel, Switzerland; and currently lives and works in Panajachel, Guatemala. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at numerous international institutions, including: Brücke Museum, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, London; Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boson, Massachusetts; Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; The Power Plant, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Jewish Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Olten, Switzerland; and Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau, Kartause Ittingen, Warth, Switzerland. A public installation of Suter’s paintings is currently on view in Coachella Valley, California as part of the 2021 iteration of “Desert X,” and in the coming year, solo presentations of Suter’s works will be staged at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland.
