Painting with Nature

Encounter with Vivian Suter

Friday, 25 and Wednesday, 7 July 2021
Admission

Tour: Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on 24 June. A maximum of 1 per person

Screening: Free, until full capacity is reached

Place
Retiro Park, Palacio de Velázquez
Capacity
Tour: 15 people
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
With the collaboration of
Programme
Encounters

The Museo Reina Sofía organises a visit to the exhibition Vivian Suter, led by the artist herself, which includes the screening of the film Vivian’s Garden (2017), directed by Rosalind Nashashibi.

The paintings of Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, 1949) foster a unique relationship with nature and draw on influences from life experience. At 33, the artist left the city of Basel, where she had lived from the age of 12, and, following a long journey, set up her home and studio on a former coffee plantation in Panajachel, Guatemala, close to the volcanic Lake Atitlán and surrounded by rainforest. It was at this point that her abstract paintings began to engage in an original and prolonged dialogue with nature, her work evading the traditional imitation or simple reflection of the natural environment as she sought to evoke the living energy of the jungle. The lushness of the vegetation, the vibration of animal sounds and the shifting tropical climate are translated on large-scale, frameless canvases without a stretcher, and through gestural brush strokes and a vivid use of colour. Over time, Suter would incorporate the effect of natural elements such as rain and wind or the actions of animals in organic and procedural paintings that develop a close-knit yet open relationship with nature.      

Thus, Suter integrates the surrounding nature into the route put forward for this tour, building a connection between the exhibition and the outside environment, a relationship that has been key to the conception of the exhibition. The visit will be followed by the screening of Vivian’s Garden, a film by the artist Rosalind Nashashibi commissioned by documenta 14 that orbits around Suter’s life in the Guatemalan jungle, strengthening that special connection between art and nature.

Programme

Friday, 25 June 2021 - 6pm

6pm - 6:45pm
Guided tour with Vivian Suter

7pm
Rosalind Nashashibi. Vivian’s Garden, with the video presentation of Rosalind Nashashibi
UK, 2017, colour, sound, original version with Spanish subtitles, 16mm transferred to digital archive, 30’

―Second Session: Wednesday, 7 July 2021 - 6pm