Lioness, 2020, bronze, lost-wax casting, 141 47/64 × 64 9/16 × 28 47/64 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Davide Rivalta (Bologna 1974)
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna until 1996, experimenting with sculpture, drawing and painting. In 1998, he won a competition for the inclusion of a work of art in the courtyard of the courthouse in Ravenna. Since then, he has received various public commissions for permanent installations in Ravenna, Rimini, Trieste and Neuchâtel. In the meantime, he has exhibited in many museums and galleries: at GAM in Bologna, MAN in Nuoro, MARCA in Catanzaro, Galleria Civica in Modena and MAMbo in Bologna. He also exhibited at the Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis in Bregenz in 2006, at the Strozzina Center for Contemporary Culture and at Villa Romana in Florence in 2009 and 2011, at Palazzo Te in Mantua in 2016 and at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2022. In 2010, he participated in the first Aichi Triennale Arts and Cities in Nagoya, in 2015 in Icastica in Arezzo and in the Biennale Disegno Rimini, in 2016 in Arte alle Corti in Turin and in 2019 in the 22nd Milan Triennale. In 2017, he began to produce monumental sculptures for urban environments, squares and streets, first in Antibes, then in Neuchâtel and Gstaad, in 2018, and two years later in Mougins. In 2019, he exhibited at the Friedhof am Hörnli in Reihen and at Forte Belvedere in Florence.
As an artist, Rivalta moves like a tightrope walker, hovering between tradition and modernity. He remains faithful to figuration and to the canons of classical beauty, never forgetting the teachings of Bernini, Rodin or Medardo Rosso. He does not abandon the method of lost-wax casting and the use of noble metals, like bronze, which hands any work down to history. He resists the allure of ready-mades and the seduction of series, declaring: “My lions are not perfect or depersonalized icons; they are individuals, real animals, each portrayed in its uniqueness.” However, he also develops his own language, which, building upon an anti-monumental approach to the work, is based on a specific creative practice. Rivalta creates site-specific installations, characterized by the attention to landscape and by participatory design: the context becomes a part of the work, or even its very substance. He displays his sculptures without a pedestal, preferably in public places, and presents them as fully-fledged invasions of wild nature reclaiming the urban sphere, resolving the duality between nature and artifice in an art that is immanent rather than abstract. The material realization of the sculptures crystallizes forms in the process of their making, preserving the charm of the unfinished. Rivalta describes this by stating: “I throw fluid earth onto a metal armature; the clay congeals; in the form, the energy of the throw remains. This stage is very quick and the randomness of the uncontrolled gesture surprises me.” The materiality of the finished works, when observed closely, reveals their origin, expresses the gesture that formed them and transmits their primordial creative energy, which is also perceived in the wild realism of the Lioness that looms menacingly on the edge of Villa Firenze’s park. (Renata Cristina Mazzantini)