The Argentine-Swiss artist Vivian Suter (*1949) has been exhibited all over the world in the most prestigious museums following her presence at documenta 14 in 2017. However, attention is being focussed mainly on her most recent work: the artist presents loose canvases hanging freely from the ceiling in dense installations. The visitors stride through her painting and experience an atmospherically concentrated work involving form, colour, abstraction and traces of the effect of weather conditions.

Today Vivian Suter lives and works in Guatemala. She was actively involved in the Basel art scene up to the 1980s, but once she had moved away from Basel her work received scarcely any more attention in Switzerland until her exhibition 2014 in the Kunsthalle Basel. The retrospective gathers together early drawings, painterly wall reliefs from the 1980s and the latest airy installations, because one of the nicest tasks of an art museum is to take a close look, communicate art-historical contexts and co-author art history. The aim is to ensure that the reception of this artist’s work is lasting in Switzerland too.