In the summer of 2025, the Palais de Tokyo organizes the larger-scale ever retrospective of Vivian Suter, with around 500 paintings produced by the artist over the course of the last ten years in her garden located in Panajachel, Guatemala where she has lived since the 1980s. Immersed in this tropical environment, Vivian Suter’s gestural and colorful painting has gradually become a documentation of her surroundings. Her daily productions capture not only the artist’s gestures but also the traces of the surrounding flora and fauna, as well as the effects of the weather—an expression of a serene and lucid acceptance of the climatic conditions that shape our lives and the impermanence of art. Vivian’s works are untitled and undated and are displayed in every possible orientation within expansive installations—a pictorial jungle where unframed canvases overlap, stack, float in the wind. Often exhibited in public spaces, they find at the Palais de Tokyo, under its skylit gallery, a setting more akin to the street than to the protected space of a museum.

Organized in collaboration with the MAAT, museum of contemporary art in Lisbon, the exhibition is the occasion for a new monographic publication in four languages, published by JRP éditions. A selection of collages by Elisabeth Wild, the artist’s mother (1922-2020), accompanies the exhibition in Paris.

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires in 1949 and lives in Panajachel, Guatemala. She is represented by the galleries Karma International, Zurich; Gladstone, New York-Brussels-Seoul; House of Gaga, Mexico DF and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.