Radial Grammar

Radial Grammar is Batia Suter's atlas of found photographs, arranging existing images into new visual sequences that let form and pattern, rather than the pictures' original captions or sources, govern meaning.

Working from an archive of appropriated photographs spanning scientific illustration, landscape and vernacular imagery, Suter builds pages of visual rhyme: recurring shapes, gestures and textures link unrelated pictures across time and origin. The 296-page book was published by Roma Publications to accompany Suter's 2018 exhibition at Le Bal, Paris, curated by Diane Dufour, and includes a separate accordion-folded supplement of illustrations bound into the volume. Texts appear in English and French.

Suter, a Swiss artist based in Amsterdam, has worked since the early 2000s with collage, appropriation and the sequencing of found images, treating photographs as raw material for essayistic argument rather than as records of firsthand observation. Radial Grammar extends the method of her earlier Parallel Encyclopedia projects into a single sustained visual grammar.