vivian suter: the great outdoors

With “Les grands espaces,” the Valais Art Museum is ushering in a new era in its history. Starting in 2025, the cantonal institution will be developing an annual exhibition cycle centered around a common theme, approached from different angles. This new approach offers visitors a multifaceted vision of the museum, with exhibitions designed from the collection and projects entrusted to guest artists, all of which echo one another around a coherent framework.

Presented from April 6, 2025 to January 11, 2026, this first cycle offers a journey structured around three exhibitions. Two of them – one by Magali Dougoud and the other by Vivian Suter – were specially designed for the venues, and the third consists of a hanging created from the collection of the Valais Art Museum on the theme of landscape and its representation on the borders of abstraction.

The museum invites the public to explore these different spaces (political, geographical, pictorial) until they are fully integrated into Vivian Suter’s large installation on the top floor of the Vidomnat Castle. The visit ends on the terraces, where visitors can discover permanent works and views of the old town of Sion.

Drawing on the collection of the Valais Art Museum, this exhibition examines how the representation of landscape in Western art has been influenced by the development of abstraction. It follows this important development at the beginning of the 20th century and aims to measure the influence of abstraction on the representation of landscape, using some seventy works by twenty-two artists from different generations.

Its aim is not to make an exhaustive assessment of the modes of representation of the landscape on the edge of abstraction, but rather to discern different strategies of representation and to pay attention to the pictorial inventiveness of the artists. Whether it is a question of restoring the luxuriance of the vegetation while leaving room for the emotions aroused by nature, of simplifying the forms and affirming the intrinsic geometry of the mountain, of merging the body with the landscape, or of treating the snow-capped peaks as a white monochrome, the artists distance themselves from reality, without ever breaking with it, and transcribe the landscape as the fruit of a sensitive experience.

Vivian Suter: Moving Nature

Vivian Suter was born in 1949 in Buenos Aires, where her father ran a textile factory and her mother, an artist, had emigrated in 1938, fleeing Nazism. She grew up there, then in Basel from 1962. In 1983, she moved to a former coffee plantation in Panajachel, Guatemala, where she still lives to this day. The atmosphere of the place, the abundant vegetation, and the animals became the central themes of her works. The artist abandoned paper in favor of canvas mounted on stretchers, then finally abandoned the stretcher, which made it difficult to transport her paintings. This change also corresponds to her habit of having her paintings hung when stored.

Vivian Suter’s works have neither titles nor dates. They are hung in space, on the floor, on the wall, or suspended, and can be stacked on top of each other or installed with more space between them. All configurations are possible and can be constantly renewed. These installations of painted fabrics, which can evoke hanging laundry, offer an immersive experience in the heart of a lush landscape evoked by the abstract canvases, as if it were a colorful and vibrant jungle, but also physical and sensory through the materials used and the scale ratio.

Magali Dougoud: To the promised waters

The exhibition Aux eaux promises presents a collection of video and sound works on the theme of water, at the intersection of ecology, feminism, and politics. Taking a local and international look at the use of water as a natural resource and collective good, the artist brings together Valais and the Democratic Republic of Congo and creates contemporary fables, blending geopolitical reality with water-related myths. Filmed in Valais in the Ayent region, Le Bisse des Dissidentes (2025) immerses us in the geography and history of bisses. Through an approach that blends documentary and magical realism, Magali Dougoud questions past, present, and future access to water and the power relations associated with it. In contrast, the video Mati Wata Water (2025) was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with limited access to drinking water despite containing more than half of the African continent’s freshwater reserves. Using the figure of the water carrier, the artist gives voice to the water spirits, rivers, and streams of the Kinshasa region to denounce the economic, ecological, and humanitarian violence crystallized by access to water. On the museum terrace, a sound piece echoes the two video works: Zombie Mermaids – A Song for Future Waters (2024) is a poetic, marvelous, and frightening song inspired by Swiss alpine legends. This feminist tale features strange aquatic figures and deals, in epic form, with the violence inflicted on women and all dissident and non-standard spirits.