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Indepth Arts News:
"Gerardo Suter: Labyrinth of Memory"
2000-02-12 until 2000-04-30
Austin Museum of Art
Austin, TX,
USA United States of America
Gerardo Suter: Labyrinth of Memory, a mid-career survey, presents the
work of
Gerardo Suter, one of Latin America s most important young photographers. In
his photographs and mixed-media installations, Suter employs themes and
subjects
drawn from pre-Columbian, myths and cultures to create powerful and haunting
metaphors of contemporary Latin American identity. The exhibition,the artist s
first in Texas,will include approximately thirty works, ranging from early
compositions of enigmatic landscapes and ruins, to larger prints of more
dramatic compositions featuring nude figures with masks and other props, to
recent monumental installations that combine photography with video and
performance elements.
Born in Argentina in 1957, Gerardo Suter has lived in Mexico since 1970.
Largely self-taught as a photographer, he emerged as one of Mexico s most
original artistic voices in the early 1980s. Suter has become an extremely
influential figure throughout Latin America, first for his move away from
straight photography towards more expressive manipulated or staged
tableaux, and
more recently for his experimental combinations of photographic images with
video, installation, and performance. His first mature work explored themes of
memory, nostalgia, and the persistence of the past in mysterious scenes of
pre-Columbian architectural remains. Suter s major series of photographs
of the
late 1980s and early 1990s pictured stylized nudes with a variety of elements,
including masks, animal skulls, stone carvings, agave spines, seashells, and
mud. These startling and compelling images seem to suggest, in the words of
Austin Museum of Art Director Elizabeth Ferrer, the simultaneously fearful and
tantalizingly sensual immediacy of Latin America s pre-Hispanic inheritance.
In his more recent works Gerardo Suter has pushed the boundaries of straight
photography, printing on sheets of transparent acetate, which are often
combined
to create enormous multi-panel images. He has incorporated these into
room-sized installations along with sound and video elements, encompassing the
viewer in enclosed, multi-sensory, and ritual environments. The depicted
figures, less explicitly pre-Columbian in their references than those in the
earlier series, have become more universal in their emotional charge. Suter s
latest installations evoke the primal forces of life and death, and the
dualities of human existence.
Gerardo Suter: Labyrinth of Memory is organized by the Americas Society, New
York, and is curated by Mary Schneider Enríquez, a Boston-based independent
curator and specialist in twentieth-century Mexican art and photography. The
exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated bilingual catalogue, available in
the Museum Store, with essays by Mary Schneider Enríquez and Olivier
Debroise, a
leading scholar of twentieth-century Mexican photography. The Members Preview
Reception has been funded by Liberty Bank.
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