Davide Rivalta – 2021

Davide Rivalta (1974) lives and works in Bologna where he studied at the Academia di Belle Arti, in which he currently teaches sculpture since 2004. Sculpture, drawing, and painting are his privileged ways of expression.

In 1998 he won a competition for an artwork in the Ravenna courthouse and placed six over-sized sculptures of gorillas in its courtyard. That was the start of his career and artistic evolution.

Rivalta dialogues and becomes one with his animals. They all exist in the real world. He ob-serves and photographs them in captivity and re-creates their behavior and their character traits with layered strokes.

“I chose not to represent stereotyped or im-personal images nor specimens of each species, but to make real individual portraits,” says Davide Rivalta. “Not a bear, a wolf, a rhinoceros, but THIS bear, THIS wolf and THIS rhinoceros, observed at length in unnatural environments in which man has locked them up in order to be able to admire them, to know them, to keep them and control them. The techniques used for their rep-resentation reflects the conflict between freedom and captivity, nature and artifice, instinct and domestication.”

Davide Rivalta’s work is present in several Italian, French and Swiss cities. He has exhibited in several Italian museums and has participated in major shows such as Aichi Triennale (Nagoya 2010), Arte alle Corti (Turin 2016), Triennale di Milano (2019).

For this new season at Château de Vullierens, the sculptor Davide Rivalta sympathetically disperses his sculptured animals throughout the gardens and offers visitors a unique and ephemeral expe-rience. His works cohabit perfectly with the ex-isting art collection, not a first experience for the artist, who chooses the location carefully in order to transmit to the visitors a strong but different animal presence according to the environment, the very essence of his work.