Not Vital is a singular and unclassifiable artist. Born in 1948 in Sent, a small village located at the end of the Engadine valley in the Swiss Alps, he grew up surrounded by nature. At the age of 18, he started a nomadic life, immersing himself in the cultures of the places where he settled successively: New York, India, Niger, Brazil, Patagonia,
Over the course of his travels, Not Vital has continuously reflected on the habitat, on the relationship between sculpture and architecture, on animality and on nature. Exploring the boundaries between abstract and figurative forms. Using the potentiality of plaster, steel, marble and ceramic with the same dexterity, as if they were as many different languages, he likes to thwart their usual functionality to give them another way of being.
Many works are inspired by his ongoing nomadism. Among them, A Plane, A Boat, A Car, A Sled (2011) combines a variety of forms to materialize in an imaginary and universal vehicle the multiplicity of means of transport necessary to reach the remote places where Not Vital settles.
The exhibition will also be the occasion to discover a new series of his HEAD sculptures, made in Jingdezhen, a city renown for being the capital of ceramics in China. Drawing inspiration from the impressive chimneys used to fire the kiln, Not Vital adapted the ancestral techniques of Chinese ceramics to produce totem-like sculptures, among the highest ever realized in this medium.
Because he regularly returns to the Swiss mountains, Not Vital does not forget the culture of his native Engadine. The signs used to mark the roads during the periods of snow have inspired him for a new series of steel sculptures, POLES (2016), which give its title to the exhibition. Featuring at their top a declination of reduced models reminiscent of some of his emblematic sculptures, they line up like signals, retracing key moments of his artistic path.
