A Painter Who Left the Art World in Order to Actually Make Art

For the past 30 years, Vivian Suter has been quietly working in her home on Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. Now, she’s found international recognition.

Featured on nytimes.com

When Vivian Suter arrived at the lake in the early 1980s, it took her three days to summon the courage to look at it. At the time, the Swiss-Argentine artist was in her early 30s and recently divorced. She had spent the previous few months driving through Central America on a solitary tour of Mesoamerican ruins. In Guatemala, where she’d come to see the Mayan Tikal architectural site, she arrived one night in a town on the outskirts of Lake Atitlán, which fills the crater of a volcano. Though she couldn’t see the lake, the thought of it unsettled her. “I was very emotional about the lake, and I didn’t dare to go and look at it,” she remembers, sitting in her garden on the northeastern side of Lake Atitlán, across from an imposing matapalo, or strangler fig. “I felt it would have an incredible attraction. I felt it would be powerful.”

That early premonition held true. Suter, now 69, has ostensibly never left. For 33 years, she has found sanctuary in a two-bedroom adobe house that she built on a wild, overgrown property at the foot of a mountain facing the lake and the dormant volcanoes beyond. Her house and gardens are haphazardly functional, and at times a little menacing. (Scorpions sometimes sting her in her bed at night.) The house is built on the site of a former coffee plantation, and the evidence of its previous life can be seen in the modest coffee harvest that her garden produces; when I visit, deep red beans are drying out in the sun. In the living room, skylights are covered with bamboo shades. Thick patterned carpets made by the country’s Momosteco weavers cover the doorways as curtains, and the walls are hung with Suter’s own work and that of her mother, Elisabeth Wild, and her son from her second marriage, Pancho.

Suter is small and slight, with feathery red hair and low-slung eyebrows that give an inquisitive air to her warm and gentle demeanor. Walking the rambling grounds and trampled pathways — she shares the house with her mother and three spirited dogs — she points out plants as if they are old friends. We stop to admire the way another matapalo has wound its muscular roots around a great clod of earth, binding it together and giving it a makeshift pedestal from which to surge up into the sky.

Up a steep, verdant incline and through a fragile, low wooden gate is Suter’s working studio — a light-filled space with screen doors that open onto a deck overlooking the thicket of plants that now obscures her view of the lake. It’s here — outside, and usually in the morning, or after dark, by lamplight — that Suter makes her raw, vivid paintings, which are filled with fiery lashings or translucent washes of paint, meditative columns of circles and dense greens, browns and reds, like chromatic distillations of the tropical environment. She works quickly and attentively, surrounded by a mess of paint pots and a chorus of bird song, church bells, the occasional belligerent rumble of a passing tuk tuk and the gentle knocking of wind-rustled bamboo.

A painting can sometimes take her just 20 minutes, “but it needs a whole lifetime,” she says. It has taken Suter about that long to find her way back to the international art world. She is in the midst of a run of exhibitions that have come her way over the past few years, including recent presentations at Art Basel Cities in Buenos Aires and the Power Plant in Toronto. Earlier this month, 20 of her paintings were installed on the High Line in New York, where they’ll hang for almost a year like a canopy, raw and unstretched, as she likes them, over the staircase that leads down to Gansevoort Street, near the entrance of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her first solo gallery show in the city is currently up at Gladstone Gallery and closes in June.

Suter might have achieved this level of success decades ago if she had wanted it, but art, not the art world, was her calling. She was given her first solo show at Stampa gallery in Basel, Switzerland, in the ’70s, and in 1981, the curator Jean-Christophe Ammann placed Suter in a group exhibition at the prestigious Kunsthalle Basel. It was then that she made the decision to walk away. The art world’s endless social obligations depressed her. “I thought, ‘All of this I don’t want,’” she recalls. “I want to get to the center, to the bottom of it.” So after the show came down, she headed west, beginning in Los Angeles and working her way down through Mexico and civil-war-era Guatemala until she found her way to the lake.

Click here to read the full article.