In 2015, the vault made headlines when it granted its first withdrawal not in the postapocalyptic future, but rather a mere seven years after its founding. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault-colloquially referred to as the “Doomsday Vault”-is a cryogenic Hail Mary for preserving the planet’s biogenetic diversity. Post, woodprints of biblical flora from the Post Herbarium books, dimensions variable. Jumana Manna, Vase with Festoon of Flowers and Dictionary (detail), 2016, lab table, ceramic set based on the bust of George E. As writer Michael Hugentobler observes, these aren’t paintings that take you by the hand, but if you’re lucky, they might keep you company. A third pits a bright yellow mass, its form reminiscent of a dragonfly, against a swath of fiery orange. In one, an electric-blue eye swims in the iris of a larger ocular shape, which sits in a lake of vermilion and black in another, a faint chartreuse stain collects in the bottom left corner of the canvas, beneath a swooning stroke of white and cornflower blue. Lacking captions, the paintings themselves appear as sundry houseguests, with little connecting them formally beyond their transitory character. Punctuating these vignettes are full-page reproductions of the paintings, photographed in situ in the artist’s mud-spattered studio. Quaytman, and “Reflections” from artists including Rosalind Nashashibi, Miriam Cahn, and Moyra Davey, who fondly recall first encounters in hotel lobbies, broken wineglasses at dinners, and breakfasts of papaya with lime. There’s a pronounced sociability to the publication, which collects essays by curators Adam Szymczyk and Hendrik Folkerts, a conversation between Suter and fellow painter R. Published on the occasion of “ La Canícula” (Dog Days)-Suter’s recent solo exhibition at The Power Plant, Toronto’s public gallery-this catalogue, VIVIAN SUTER (Hatje Cantz, $65), embarks into the wilds of the artist’s practice. Rather than reduce nature to a fixed image, the painter conjures the cycles of destruction and regeneration at its core. Her forms swarm and dissipate her colors barely commit themselves to the canvas, which remains unstretched. Suter promptly stopped treating her works as precious objects to be protected and instead opened them up to the elements to make peace with their own precariousness. In drenching her canvases with mud, the hurricane freed the artist even more radically from existing conventions dictating how paintings should look and function. But one does not pick and choose which aspects of nature one “returns” to. Born in Buenos Aires but raised in Basel, Suter had sought refuge from her growing stardom on the Swiss art scene by decamping to the jungles of Panajachel in 1983. In 2005, Hurricane Stan wreaked havoc on Guatemala, triggering catastrophic mudslides, including one that ravaged artist Vivian Suter’s studio. David Regen Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels View of Vivian Suter’s studio, Panajachel, Guatemala, 2018.