Not Vital (b. 1948) is a Swiss artist who has traveled and exhibited widely since the 1970s, living between the United States, Niger, Italy, China and Brazil.
His art is inspired by his nomadic lifestyle and experiences of travelling the globe, reflecting on habitations, nature and animals, and on the relationships between sculpture and architecture. Exploring the boundaries between abstract and figurative forms, his work is marked by a particularly intimate relationship with materials, including plaster, steel, marble, ceramic and organic matter. He often collaborates with skilled craftsmen around the world, ranging from Beijing steel-chasers and Murano glass-blowers, to Tuareg silversmiths and Bhutan papermakers. The physicality of his approach, combined with an innate understanding of his chosen materials' essential properties, results in visually challenging works that are often destabilising in their striking scale and presence.
In 2009, Vital coined the term “SCARCH”, a conflation of the two words sculpture and architecture. The buildings Vital subsumes under his neologism are formalistic and exist primarily to fill one single—usually poetic and transcendental—purpose, such as the contemplation of the sunset or the night sky. Crucial to his built structures are not the comforts of home or the way in which we might live in them, but rather the way in which they enable us to look at the world.
Vital’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), curated by Harald Szeemann, and the 17th International Architecture Biennale (2021). Major solo exhibitions were held at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany (2005); The Arts Club of Chicago, United States (2006); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011); Museo d'arte Mendrisio, Switzerland (2014–15); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, United Kingdom (2016); Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland (2018-19); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2020–21).
