Mud and Dirt: Vivian Suter’s Paintings

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

There is something that especially delights me about the story, and then also the paintings, of Vivian Suter, who happens to have a show up right now at the extension of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the extension being a large building in Retiro Park called the Velazquez Palace, which is packed full right now with hundreds of paintings by Vivian Suter, more paintings than I have maybe ever seen in a one-person show and this, indeed, is part of the delight of Vivian Suter, part of what is so fascinating about Vivian Suter, namely, that she doesn’t seem to care about her canvases all that much and so you can pack a smallish palace with hundreds of them, hanging all over the place, lying in piles, whatever, some of them covered in dirt and other detritus and a couple of them marked with what seems to be the footprints of dogs, pawprints I guess.

As the story goes, Suter, born in Argentina in 1949 but then living in Switzerland as a young woman, Suter was sort of making her way as an abstract painter in the European artworld from the mid-60s to the early 80s and then she took a trip to Central America in 1982 and, basically, she never came back.

More here.