On sale at the Palais de Tokyo’s bookstore
Book published by JRP|Editions in partnership with the Palais de Tokyo and MAAT (Lisbon)
 
 
Lavishly illustrated, this publication on the Argentine-Swiss artist Vivian Suter offers an immersive approach to her acclaimed painting practice, whose relationship with the natural world makes it particularly challenging. Her gestural works are the result of a daily, physical and emotional relationship with the materials and the contingencies of nature in the subtropical ecosystem where she lives and works. Rain, earth, humidity, light, flora, and fauna often inhabit her unstretched canvases, expressing her close interaction with external factors and her break with the traditional notion of controlling authorship, to create a versatile and monumental body of work, visually incomparable—an ode to the possibilities of painting.
 
Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at MAAT (Lisbon) in 2024-2025, and the Palais de Tokyo in 2025, the volume includes two essays by the shows’ curators Sérgio Mah and François Piron underlining the specificity of her art, an extensive selection of over 200 recent works, a commissioned portfolio documenting the activity in Suter’s studio in Panajachel (Guatemala) where she settled in 1982, as well as a selection of exhibition views underlining her unique approach to exhibition making. Furthermore, poetic texts (songs, aphorisms, free prose) written by the artist are scattered throughout the 320-page volume.