Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires once her parents emigrated from Europe following the Second World War. After studying art in Basel, Switzerland, during a trip to Latin America in the 1980s, she settled in Panajachel – on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala – where she still lives with her mother, the painter Elisabeth Wild. Suter's close and personal relationship with nature is a determinant and constitutes a driving force in her pictorial work, it is particularly visible in the Nisyros series.