Two Basel artists exhibit their art in Vienna

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Two separate exhibitions show the works of the temporary Basel artists Elisabeth Wild and Vivian Suter, who brought life along winding paths to Guatemala and back into the Central European art scene.

Family reunion in Vienna: Vivian Suter in the Secession (left) and Elisabeth Wild in the Mumok.

Family reunion in Vienna: Vivian Suter in the Secession (left) and Elisabeth Wild in the Mumok.

Image: zvg

It is a kind of family gathering that is taking place in Vienna over the past few weeks. An Austrian-Swiss family reunion that took long detours: via Argentina, Switzerland and Guatemala back to the city where it started – back in 1938. There are works by Elisabeth Wild in the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Mumok). see: small-format collages, architectural forms, landscapes, mask-like cuts and early works by this artist who has received little attention for so long.

And there are the huge screens of her daughter Vivian Suter, just a five-minute walk away in the Vienna Secession. It’s a coincidence, so to speak – and then somehow not one. Both houses had asked the respective artists independently of each other, then the pandemic came, and with it the delays. In the end, it was possible to hold the two exhibitions of mother and daughter practically synchronously. Two very different exhibitions – but they have a lot in common.

The life work of these two women is inextricably linked to the place where they were created: Guatemala. Because even if the escape determined the lives of the two women, their works revolve primarily around arriving at this very place: Panajachel.

A house like a cocoon

Elisabeth Wild (1922-2020) had to flee Vienna from the National Socialists, her father was Jewish. The family first fled to Argentina, where Elisabeth Wild married a Swiss textile entrepreneur. In 1949 their daughter Vivian was born. However, after anti-Semitic attacks had also occurred in Argentina, the family moved to Basel in 1962. However, Vivian did not stay in Switzerland, she traveled and in 1983 settled on a coffee plantation in Panajachel, Guatemala. Her mother, who ran an antique shop in Basel, followed in 2007.

A place in the middle of the forest is this sanctuary. A house with nothing but wilderness to look out of, windows open and a sultry breeze blowing through. It is this house that everything in the two exhibitions ultimately revolves around. A house like a cocoon. Green, warm, scented with earth.

Vivian Suter's works in the Secession.

Vivian Suter’s works in the Secession.

Image: zvg

And so the door at the back of the Secession, where Vivian Suter’s large canvases hang on the walls and ceiling and lie on the floor, is open to let nature in. Even if this is reduced to a small green strip between two busy streets. The first room in Elisabeth Wild’s show at Vienna’s Mumok is also modeled on a house with tropical nature creeping into the room through the windows.

A light forest of freely hanging canvases

It is nature that plays a major role in Vivian Suter’s work. She paints huge canvases that she stretches between banana and coffee trees – and leaves them there to the forces of nature. Leaves stick to these canvases, splashes of mud can be seen, and dog paw prints can be seen. Curator Jeanette Pacher says that this is not about transience, but rather about “changeability”. And despite the density in which the show is hung, one has the feeling of walking through a sparse forest of freely hanging canvases.

Elisabeth Wild in Panajachel.

Elisabeth Wild in Panajachel.

Image: zvg

Jeanette Pacher describes the construction work, in which Vivian Suter was also involved, as a “process”. It was like “painting in space”.

And the meetings between Mumok curator Marianne Dobner and Elisabeth Wild in Panajachel were also a process. Back then, in early 2020, they looked through hundreds of collages for the exhibition in Vienna. In the last years of her life, Suter’s mother, confined to a wheelchair, had been driven as if driven, cutting out details from magazines, sorting them and arranging them into miniatures. Wild had set himself a workload: one collage per day. For every day of the year, 365 works by Elisabeth Wild can be seen in the Mumok: fantastic landscapes, fantasy architecture, ornaments.

Elisabeth Wild passed away just a few weeks after Marianne Dobner’s visit to Panajachel in spring 2020.

The curator admits that it was a challenge to use such a legacy to create an exhibition that was supposed to meet the artist’s wishes. Ultimately, with Vivian Suter in particular, it was important to avoid the impression that the house of the deceased was being cleared out.

Insights into the biographies of the two women

The two curators have succeeded in showing the work of two women who have found their way back into the European art world via intricate detours in the jungle and out of the jungle through equally intricate detours. These two women appeared sensitive, empathetic, tangible, but above all noticeably close and full of life – even though one of them is no longer alive.

Collage by Elisabeth Wild in the Vienna Secession.

Collage by Elisabeth Wild in the Vienna Secession.

Image: zvg/Secession

The fact that this is the case is mainly due to the insights into the biographies that are equally offered in both shows. At the Secession, these are the way the work is hung, which is reminiscent of the work process, a comprehensive publication and accompanying texts, and a song that Vivian Suter recorded with her son.

In the Mumok, this is above all the first room, which is modeled on the house in Panajachel and in which early works, textile designs and advertising texts for Elisabeth Wild’s antique shop in Basel can be seen, which the writer and ex-son-in-law (i.e. Vivian Suter’s ex-husband) Martin Suter wrote.

And so, as a viewer, you end up a bit in the jungle yourself.

Vivian Suter: “A Stone in the Lake”, Vienna Secession, until June 18. www.secession.at
Elizabeth Wild: «Fantasy Factory», Mumok Vienna, until January 2024. www.mumok.at



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