First South America Exhibition for NOT VITAL to Open in Rio de Janiero

Beginning 8 October 2015, Centro Cultural Pac?o Imperial is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition in South America devoted to distinguished Swiss artist Not Vital (b. 1948). Now in his sixties, with a career spanning over four decades, Vital has emerged as a singular thinker whose artistic practice engages philosophies of habitat and material life and produces works that refuse categorization. An incessant traveler and curious explorer, Vital lives a nomadic life that has informed his art and made him a master of the liminal. His work draws inspiration from the many diverse and disparate places he has called home over the years. Raised in the small village of Sent among the soaring mountains of the Engadin valley in Switzerland, he has traveled across the globe, establishing himself first in New York during the 1980s and thereafter in far flung points. Across continents, he has set up studios and constructed architectural sculptures as transient residential dwellings in both urban settings and vast landscapes, from Cairo, Egypt, and Patagonia, Chile, to Agadez, Niger; Beijing, China; Flores, Indonesia; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Organized with Olivier Renaud-Cle?ment, Not Vital will be on view at Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro through 27 November 2015. In conjunction with the exhibition, Not Vital is constructing House to Watch the Sunset in Parana? (near Manaus), Brazil.

Engaging with and assimilating local cultural impressions into his larger artistic practice, Vital presents works at Paço Imperial that explore the relationship between materiality, form, and meaning. These works present familiar subjects that the artist re-conceives in wholly unexpected ways. HEADS (2013-2015) is a new body of work that re-envisions the notion of portraiture and traverses the realms of both representation and abstraction. For this series, Vital has drawn inspiration from the form of a Buddha encountered during a trip to Laos in 2013. Transforming that figure's concentrated spirituality and remarkable beauty into a new and highly personal sculptural language, the artist pares down figurative representation to subtle contours, denying any notion of individualized expression.

Suspended in time, Vital's HEADS recall the most ancient forms of prehistoric art while their highly reflective, monochromatic steel surfaces place them emphatically within the technologically advanced present. Since 2008, when the artist set up his studio in the arts district of Caochangdi in Beijing, Not Vital has been collaborating with highly skilled Chinese artisans to produce sculptures in stainless steel. For the series HEADs, the technique of PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) coating was employed to create consistent, highly polished, luminously reflective surfaces. Commanding the physical presence of the spaces they inhabit, the ominous silhouettes of Vital's sculptures engage the viewer in a vortex of fluid reflections.

In an installation that spans the entirety of one gallery wall, Not Vital confronts viewers with 750 Knives (2004). Here, the artist has plunged seven hundred and fifty individual blades of different sizes into a wall. On the opposite side, their sharp, pointed edges protrude outward. A work of poetic Minimalism, 750 Knives establishes a relationship between artwork and viewer that is charged with both danger and allure. Although disconcerting in its violence, the work possess quiet strength and mysterious beauty. Vital also achieves a surprising painterly aesthetic in which his carefully place knives create drawings in flux -- an effect that offers a counterpoint to obvious acts of provocation.

Employing the wall once more as his canvas, Vital has created a site- specific work for Pac?o Imperial that bears a striking resemblance to the explosive vestiges of a snowball fight. For Snowball Wall (2015), he employs a performative approach, throwing plaster 'snowballs' at a wall upon which their forms rupture on impact. Vital has used plaster throughout his career and has often explained that his attraction to it stems from the way in which, for a brief period, it has the consistency of snow. Transforming and elevating ordinary forms and materials into extraordinary apparitions richly imbued with association, Vital draws upon his own extensive collection of lingering impressions and personal experiences of foreign lands and local people. The genesis of his work resides in his uniquely nomadic lifestyle and the impulse toward movement, suspension, and impermanence; but Snowball Wall relates directly to Vital's childhood home in the Swiss Alps. Distinct tension between the nomadic and the fixed is felt in Vital's sculpture and yields its lyrical effects. Vital's work highlights the contrasts between culture and nature, abstraction and mutation, human artifice and animal species, stasis and flux, setting up dialogues that account for the enigmatic beauty and conceptual play of Not Vital's art