Purple Art

[January 28 2020]

"Cannot Enter Cannot Exit", 2020

Not Vital’s “SCARCH” Exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Somerset

Swiss artist Not Vital brings his irreverent charms to Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset location with ‘SCARCH’ (his portmanteau of sculpture and architecture), an exhibition organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément and Giorgia von Albertini.

Zingy, metallic highlights from the show here include a scaled-down taste of the artist’s giant sun-worship installations in Niger, Brazil, Switzerland and beyond, and a blown-up, pitted ‘Date’ big enough to cocoon a viewer within its polished metal insides. Meanwhile, a series of mixed media works on paper (often constructed/carefully scrabbled together from found objects and hardware store finds from Vital’s travels) offer some of the big thinking on a smaller scale.

Outside, the ‘Bales’ littered around the site bind the show into the West Country agricultural setting, while ‘Cannot Enter Cannot Exit’ mirrors the gallery’s dovecote in a form that perfectly matches the height of Michelangelo’s ‘David’. And back inside, ‘100 Architects’ (2016) further translates Vital’s mathematical curiosity into a mini cityscape of Chinese granite – famous architects and designers coded through their dates of birth into minimalist towers.

Not Vital’s “SCARCH” exhibition organised by Olivier Renaud-Clément and Giorgia von Albertini is on view until May 4th at the Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Photo and text by Jethro Turner