Not Vital: What does the wind do when it doesn’t blow?

NOT VITAL: Qué hace el viento cuando no sopla? (What does the wind do when it doesn’t blow?). Opening at proyectoamil: October 22, 2025, 7pm.

proyectoamil and the Museo de Arte de Lima–MALI present the first exhibition in Peru of renowned Swiss artist Not Vital (Sent, 1948). His multidisciplinary practice moves fluidly between sculpture, painting, architecture, and installation. Rooted in an ongoing dialogue with nature and diverse cultures, Vital’s work creates forms that resonate with and adapt to the spaces they inhabit.

His pieces transform the way we perceive our environment. Using materials that range from the ephemeral and delicate—such as coffee or salt—to the enduring and precious—such as marble or gold—Vital creates experiences that blur the boundaries between art and landscape. In all of them, he combines a playful dimension with a sober elegance. His practice, shaped by his Swiss upbringing but deeply influenced by his travels around the world, reflects a fascination with cultural exchange, landscape, and materiality.

The exhibition at proyectoamil brings together a group of self-portraits, sculptures, collages, drawings, and photographs that highlight the breadth of his artistic practice. The series of oil self-portraits explores a minimalist and abstract vision of the human figure. Among the sculptures are sixty-one pieces from the Cow Dung series, a project conceived with the idea of producing 1,000 unique sculptures by casting 1,000 bronze pieces of sun-dried cow dung. Proceeds from this series were dedicated to the construction of a hospital specializing in burn treatment in Kathmandu. The artist was intrigued by the paradox of transforming cow dung—something valuable in Nepal but worthless in Switzerland—into a costly object in the Swiss art market (but of no value in Nepal). By casting it in bronze, he turned a “good burn” into support for healing a “bad burn.”

More than forty collages and drawings, created on paper and blackboard, accompany the sculptures and paintings. These works were created in Lima during a 2017 residency and are inspired by the landscape of the Engadin Valley in Switzerland, where Vital grew up and still lives part of the year. The exhibition also includes a series of photographs of his project NotOna, a house-sculpture built on an island near the Marble Cathedrals in Lake General Carrera, in Chilean Patagonia. This work forms part of Vital’s dream of building houses from which to watch the sunset on every continent.

At the Museo de Arte de Lima, Vital will also present a site-specific intervention titled Snowball Wall.

Vital’s work is held in numerous prestigious public collections around the world, including the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, France); Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, Switzerland); the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York, USA); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA); the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA); the Museum der Moderne (Salzburg, Austria); the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (Aichi, Japan); and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), among many others.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Embassy of Switzerland in Peru.