Untitled (Rack)

Vivian Suter installs her large-scale abstract paintings as immersive interiors that mirror the exterior of her home: the Guatemalan rainforest. Since the early 1990s, Suter has lived and worked in a remote studio on a former coffee plantation in Panajachel, more than 100 miles from Guatemala City. Suter often creates and places her colorful, untreated canvases outdoors, exposing them to the elements and the porous architecture of the rainforest. Hurricanes, mudslides, the bright tropical sun, and plant and animal life leave their mark and contribute to the generative life of the paintings. Suter embraces the inevitability of her works’ natural decay and their mortality as organic structures, underscoring the life cycles of which her paintings are a part. Her approach to their installation is rooted in the ecology of their former context. Suter assembles her paintings to create an interior in which the individual works are at once autonomous and congruent, harmonious and dissonant— similar to the life that is invoked in and through these works.