Artist Not Vital uses glass and stainless steel to explore landscape at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Despite a 45-year career spent creating pieces and installations around the world, it was only May 2016 that Swiss artist Not Vital opened his first U.K. exhibition. On view at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park through January 2, 2017, the large-scale solo show combines several new works designed specifically for the site with a collection of the artists's older pieces. Born in Sent, a small village in the Swiss Alps, Not Vital grew up in an isolated landscape. Since his childhood, however, he has travelled widely, producing and leaving site-specific installations in the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Patagonia. Both Not Vital's isolated upbringing and subsequent international career are reflected in the pre-occupation with landscape articulated in many of his works. Using glass and highly polished, chased stainless steel, the artist inexorably links his sculptures and paintings both to the Swiss landscapes that he occupied as a child, and the international landscape that he occupies as an artist. 

The exhibition, on view until January 2017, features both an indoor and outdoor gallery, each populated with pieces that explore both the Yorkshire landscape and the natural world of Not Vital's childhood. As articulated by Sarah Coulson in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, large highly polished outdoor sculptures like Moon and Pelvis reflect "each environment into which [they are] placed — a relationship that seems also to mirror the artists own way of absorbing and assimilating the nuances and particularities of the places he visits." The smooth reflective surface of Moon — a large chased silver sphere covered in craters mapped directly from photographs of the moon — distorts the highly manicured English landscape of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for the viewer, creating an inaccessible alternate landscape within the bounds of the globe. 

On a smaller scale, in the indoor gallery Snowball uses glass to evoke the artist's fond memories of the Swiss landscape. Displayed alongside a painting in plaster titled Snowballs, the Snowball itself was made by Vetreria Pino Signoretto on Murano. Solid spheres of white glass incased in a thick layer of clear, the snowballs reflect Not Vital's distinctive palette. As the artist explains, "I think if you grow up in a surrounding where you have snow for six months of the year, your eyes are naturally sensitive to white. Then, when the snow melts, the mountains turn grey... So I became accustomed to these nuances in grey and white and not so much colour." In Snowball, Vital harnesses the transparency and solidity of glass to capture these colors of his youth. As Coulson articultes, even though "snowballs instantly relate to the childlike pleasure of play, the coldness and texture of snow in your hand, the physicality of a snowball fight... the single glass Snowball appears to be held in suspension, frozen in time and space, and... rendered still, silent and strange when removed from its typical context."

Even though Moon is rendered in stainless steel both pieces use traits common to glass, reflectivity and transparency, to create intimately familiar forms and render them strange. The highly reflective surface of the outdoor sculptures absorbs and distorts their physical surroundings, while, as Coulson argues, Snowball''s stilled white globe represents and yet distorts our pre-concieved notion of what a snowball should be. While an important theme in his work, Not Vital's exploration of landscape through the reflectivity and transparency of his materials is a small part of the artist's prolific output, which is well represented in the show and includes The Last Supper, a large painting produced specifically for the indoor gallery making it's debut at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 

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Exhibition Website