Exhibitions

The exhibition Disco by Vivian Suter was organised by MAAT, Lisbon and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
It benefits from the support for artistic production and partnership of ArtWorks.

Opening: Friday November 7th, 2025 at 6pm

Curator: Hélène Audiffren

Vivian Suter works daily in her garden in Panajachel, Guatemala, where she has lived since the 1980s. She incorporates external factors such as humidity, light, flora and fauna into her painting, thus documenting her living environment. The forces and textures of Guatemala’s lush subtropical nature are recorded in the artist’s gestural and colourful painting.

The works, which are untitled and undated, can then be hung in any direction within proliferating installations. Visitors literally walk through Vivian Suter’s paintings until they are physically immersed in a dense work whose atmosphere is composed of shapes, colours and traces left by the weather.

Carré d’Art - Museum of Contemporary Art will present the exhibition Disco by artist Vivian Suter from 8 November 2025 to 29 March 2026, previously unveiled at MAAT in Lisbon and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. As with each iteration of the exhibition, the hundreds of canvases created in recent years are rearranged in a free and spontaneous manner according to the architecture of the venue. They accumulate and overlap across the entire height of the walls, float in mid-air, are suspended from structures or pile up on the floor. In Nîmes, the canvases interact with Norman Foster’s architecture to offer viewers a new immersive experience.

A series of collages by Elisabeth Wild, the artist’s mother (1922-2020), completes the exhibition.

The exhibition is the subject of a monographic book in four languages, published by JRP éditions.

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires in 1949. She moved with her family to Basel at the age of twelve. There she studied art at the School of Arts and Crafts. Between 1962 and 1982, she lived in Switzerland and travelled throughout Africa, Europe and North America. She produced drawings, collages and large sheets of brightly coloured paper, which she exhibited in various Swiss galleries during the 1970s. In 1982, she travelled to Latin America and in 1983 settled in Panajachel, Guatemala, where she still lives today. It was in this subtropical environment that she replaced paper with canvas.

She is represented by the Karma International gallery in Zurich; Gladstone in New York, Brussels and Seoul; House of Gaga in Mexico City; and Proyectos Ultravioleta in Guatemala City.

To download