Artists

Vivian Suter, Elisabeth Wild

Press release

Opening: Wednesday, 30 September, 6 – 9 pm Duration: 30 September 2026 – 16 January 2027 Melas Martinos is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of Vivian Suter (*1949 in Buenos Aires, Argentina), Panchito & Maxsi, opening on September 30, 2026. The exhibition brings together approximately 60 works spanning across different decades of Vivian Suter's practice in Panajachel, Guatemala, where she has lived and worked since the early 1980s. After notable initial success following her graduation at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel in 1972, Suter decided to settle in Guatemala in 1981 , which led to a prolonged period outside of the spotlight. With her participation at documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, her work again attracted worldwide attention. Her painterly oeuvre has reflected a close interplay between art and nature, especially after two hurricanes flooded her studio in 2005 and 2010. These events represent a turning point as they fundamentally and lastingly changed the artist's understanding of authorship and the creative process. Instead of cleaning and restoring the damaged canvases, Suter decided to embrace the conditions of her environment and started using nature as an active collaborator in her practice. She deliberately exposes the canvases to the elements, plants, and animals on a daily basis. Persistent experimentation and the incorporation of decay and destruction became important components of Vivian Suter's work, accentuating how she views painting: vulnerable, subject to constant transformation, unstable and perishable. Throughout her career, Suter has continued to investigate the possibilities of her medium, breaking down the concept of the canvas as a self-contained space, and exploring how painting can reach beyond the traditional frame in unconventional ways. The exhibition design at Melas Martinos, realized by Japanese architect Kimura Hiroyuki, presents the paintings as suspended and layered elements across the two floors of the gallery space, allowing the viewer to walk among and around them. A selection of small-scale collage works by Elisabeth Wild (1922–2020), the artist's mother, will also be presented as part of the exhibition. Elisabeth Wild was an Austrian-Swiss artist whose distinctive collage practice gained international recognition in the later decades of her life. Born in Vienna, she left Austria with her family in 1938 and settled in Buenos Aires, where she studied art and worked in textile design. She later lived in Switzerland before moving to Guatemala, where she spent much of her remaining life. Working across a variety of media throughout her career, Wild developed a highly individual visual language in her collages. Created from carefully selected fragments of printed images, these small-scale works – Fantasías, as she called them – bring together elements of architecture, design, landscape, and popular culture to form intricate and often unexpected compositions. Balancing precision with imagination, her collages evoke both constructed environments and dreamlike spaces. Wild's work received widespread international attention in her nineties, culminating in exhibitions at major institutions and inclusion in significant international exhibitions. Today, her oeuvre is celebrated for its originality, formal inventiveness, and sustained creative vitality, securing her place as a singular figure in contemporary collage.