Davide Dormino was born in Udine in 1973. He lives and works in Rome.

The artist expresses himself mainly through sculpture and drawing, seeking new forms and exploiting the lyrical and plastic possibilities of materials such as marble, bronze and iron.

Her public and environmental artworks show a tendency towards monumentality (Poltergeist, 2019) and the appropriation of space (Naviganti – Monument à l’imagination, 2017). Each of his creations explores a quest for meaning by tackling themes fundamental to mankind (Atlante, 2019).

He has created environmental works in Italy and abroad, including Breath (2011), commissioned by the United Nations and permanently installed on the North Lawn of the UN headquarters in New York.

Anything to Say? (2015) is a traveling bronze monument to freedom of expression and information. Unlike traditional statues fixed on a pedestal, anchored in public space, this work travels to be seen and heard. It represents three emblematic figures of our time – Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden – standing on three chairs. Through the WikiLeaks platform, these whistleblowers have revealed war crimes and human rights violations, shaking governments around the world.

The sculpture invites the public to interact: a fourth empty chair is placed next to it, suggesting that everyone climb onto it to take a stand and express themselves. For this committed work, Davide Dormino was awarded the Prix Éthique in 2016 by the French organization AntiCor.

Since 2003, he has taught drawing, sculpture and installation at the R.U.F.A. (Rome University of Fine Arts).

Born in Morocco, Laure Boulay began her career in journalism before turning to sculpture. After the words, it was her hands that took the floor. Her work is expressed mainly in bronze, but also in iron and aluminum.

Reluctant to accept linear biographies, she believes that it is her work that tells her story. “My artistic birth may date back to 2005, with a pile of clay on a kitchen table,” she says. “But in reality, it’s rooted in a long process, which began in childhood, when I was already splashing around in the mud, shaping old oak trees with roots as numerous as their branches.”

Self-taught, she never took an academic course in the plastic arts. “I’ve never been to the École des Beaux-Arts or the Université du Dessin,” she confides. “I don’t have any artistic qualifications, so I became a journalist.”  But one day, words were no longer enough. Writing trapped emotions in a straitjacket of letters, while matter could be kneaded, deformed and sculpted to give shape to buried anxieties.

At the heart of his work lies an obsession: the human being, prisoner of himself. This thread runs through all her work, and is reflected in her sculptures, which are marked by tension, confinement and resilience.

Her solo exhibitions include Brave New World at Galerie Pièce Unique, Paris. She has also participated in several group shows, including Monologue à deux in Meaux and the OSTRALE biennial in Dresden, where she has exhibited several times. Her sculpture ELLE has been shown at the Salon d’Automne, OSTRALE (Dresden), Potsdam and Amsterdam.

Today, her work is part of several private collections in Europe and Asia.

Laure has been present in Vullierens since 2024 with two installations: Scala Spina in the Château cellar and Les Autres in the Courtyard.

Yves Dana, born June 25, 1959 in Alexandria, Egypt, is a Swiss sculptor renowned for his work in iron, stone and bronze. In 1961, his family moved to Switzerland, where Dana began his artistic career. In 1979, he opened his first studio in Lausanne and began working in iron, creating over 200 sculptures in this material.

Parallel to his artistic activity, Dana obtained a degree in sociology from the University of Lausanne in 1981 and a diploma from the École Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Geneva in 1983. His first major exhibition took place in 1985 at Galerie Alice Pauli, marking the beginning of his recognition. In 1987, he set up his studio at the Orangerie du Parc Mon-Repos in Lausanne, an exceptional location that became essential to his creativity.

In 1996, a six-month stay in Egypt had a profound influence on his work. He simplified his forms and concentrated on hieratic pieces, inaugurating the “Stèles” series. In 1999, he turned to stone sculpture, working with blocks from various countries. In 2002, he abandoned iron to focus entirely on stone, creating monumental sculptures exhibited in prestigious venues including New York and Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum.

Dana has taken part in over 120 group exhibitions and more than 50 solo shows worldwide. In 2009, he opened a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, where he continues to work in plaster and stone. In 2015, he was awarded the Fondation Vaudoise pour la Culture prize, and a major retrospective was organized at the Musée Arlaud in Lausanne. In 2022, a sculpture was exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; in 2023, a new monograph was published, highlighting the importance of his work, and a major retrospective was organized at Artcurial, Paris. Since then, he has collaborated with the Waddington Custot Gallery in London.

Yves Dana’s sculptures have been on display in Vullierens since 2023.

Catherine Gfeller is a Swiss artist born in Neuchâtel in 1966, who now lives in Paris and the South of France with her husband, the philosopher Bernard Salignon, and their daughter Clara.

For more than thirty years, she has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions around the world (Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Germany, England, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, United States, France, Holland, Israel, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine).

Her means of expression are photography and video; she was awarded the HSBC Foundation for Photography Prize in 1999 and the Ministry of Culture Prize in 2022.

Her inspiration comes from distant travel, cities and crowds, uninhabited landscapes or women in motion. She reinterprets them by creating “multi-compositions” that offer us a subjective vision of our contemporary lives.

In her museum exhibitions, Catherine Gfeller invites visitors to wander through large-scale installations in the form of photographs, video projections, sound pieces, or sculptural objects. The spectators are immersed in the middle of a sensory universe, oscillating between fiction and reality.

Her stays in China have particularly fascinated her and she is interested in the evocation of the Chinese woman, both contemporary and immemorial.

In her installation in Vullierens entitled La Gardienne du Temps, Catherine Gfeller pays homage to a forgotten woman, passed over in silence, a mother who has disappeared and yet is at the origin of a great lineage.

By mixing historical facts and poetic invention, Catherine Gfeller gives life to this unknown woman – as if she had crossed space and time.

She represents and reinvents the Chinese wife of the famous pioneer watchmaker Edouard Bovet-de-Chine (1797-1849), mother of their son Edouard-Georges, who was born in Macao and later lived in the canton of Vaud. We know neither the identity of this woman, nor her story, and it is on this enigma that Catherine Gfeller has based her project.

Standing at the edge of the Vullierens park, between two trees (an echo of another couple, Philemon and Baucis), the Guardian of Time scans the horizon and takes up her place, her anchorage with her filiation and her personal history.

A sign of her destiny? The owner of the place is called M. Bovet. Suitcase in hand and coming from far away, she arrived at the right place, our Lady Bovet. Look, SHE IS THERE, ready to deliver some words – sibylline words that everyone can interpret and make their own.

The double installation La Gardienne du Temps holds a special place in Catherine Gfeller’s creation because of its size (5 meters) and its sculptural technique in collaboration with specialists : Xavier Hool and Jacques Moinecourt.

The presence of the phrase ELLE EST LÀ shows the literary aspect of her work, always in filigree in her photographs and videos to express the thoughts of her protagonists or those of the artist herself who addresses the public – as in a wink.

Paolo Grassino (b. 1967, Turin) is an Italian artist whose monumental sculptures combine organic forms and mechanical elements. Working in raw materials such as concrete, rubber and wax, he fashions hybrid figures, human or animal, frozen in a suspended moment. His work questions the tensions between nature and technology, loss of identity and dehumanization. Despite their apparent coldness, his sculptures exude a strong emotional charge and invite deep, silent reflection. Present in the gardens since 2021 (on loan from a friend of the Châtelain), his installation, placed in the Cathedral de Saule, creates a powerful dialogue with the site – an experience both sensory and contemplative.

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.

Julian Voss-Andreae is a German-born sculptor based in Portland, Oregon. Starting out as a painter, he later changed course and studied quantum physics which inspired him greatly. Voss-Andreae’s work has quickly gained critical attention and is included in multiple institutional and private collections in the U.S and abroad.

His best known sculptures are the anamorphic ones that disappear when you change your angle of view. They are made up of many metal plates all connected in a perfectly parallel way and with an identical space between each one. Thus, when you stand right in front of the statue, you can only see the very thin slices of the iron plates and the structure becomes practically invisible.

Head
2019, Stainless Steel

Michele Spanghero was born in 1979 in Gorizia, Italy. He lives and works in Italy. Michele Spanghero graduated in Modern Literature from the University of Trieste and has participated in various workshops in electronic music, improvisation, sound and video design. His preferred mediums are sound installation linked to acoustic principles, sculpture and photography. Known for his sound-emitting sculptures, the result of sound recordings of empty spaces, the artist is often associated with the discipline of Sound Art. His work has been exhibited and presented in museums, galleries, clubs and festivals in different European countries, China, Turkey, United States among others.

The sculpture Dià (from the Greek διά, “through”) combines the dimensions of silence and sound. It consists of two trunks assembled according to the golden number, through which the spectators can listen or observe the surrounding landscape. The device invites the audience to interact with both cavities as with a megaphone or peephole in order to engage in an intimate dialogue (dià-logos) through the sculpture itself.

This sculpture has been on display in the gardens since 2020.

Markus Graf was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1962. After training as a blacksmith in Switzerland, he opened his first workshop. After a long journey he trained as a sculptor in Müllheim, Switzerland, and then founded his studio in Frauenfeld, where he produced iron sculptures.

Gabriel Mazenauer was born in Wil, Switzerland, in 1970. He began his training with an apprenticeship as a carpenter and then completed his training as a sculptor in Müllheim, Switzerland. He continued his studies as a stonemason and then moved to his workshop in Wigoltingen, Switzerland, where he produced stone and iron sculptures.

The personal and artistic friendship between the iron sculptor Markus Graf and the sculptor Gabriel Mazenauer has led to several projects. Together they manage to realize sculptures in large dimensions and to find a simple language of form.

Silhouette is a steel creation designed by the two friends and created in 2018. It consists of seven arches of straight and curved surfaces that form a horizontal line of more than 12 meters. The installation gives the impression of coming out of the ground to cross the air and disappear at the other end, one can also see the perimeter of the Swiss mountain peaks. Depending on the point of view, the sculpture is presented in a completely different way, narrow or wide, intertwined or with a clear line like a watermark.

The sculpture has been installed in our gardens since 2019.

Pieter Obels is a Dutch sculptor born in 1968. He studied at the Academy of Art in Tilburg. Obels first experimented different materials for his work and after some years settled for steel, which allowed him to express his ideas best.

Pieter Obels explains “I don’t start off with a real plan when I embark upon a new sculpture. My works come about spontaneously, as the result of improvisation. I transform the rigid corten steel into graceful and bold sculptures. I submit the raw material to what I want to express visually. I make it dance and move without a set rhythm. In the same way, you have to experience my work through your own movement and discover the sculpture from various angles and aspects. That is how you can best feel the movement of the steel.”

Obels’ sculptures can be found in many private and public collections around the world.

Three of his sculptures are installed in our garden since 2019.

Georges Coulon was born in Chartre, France, in 1914. He studied at the Ecole des Arts Appliqués and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Thanks to his technical mastery and creative talent, he was quickly noticed among his peers and won the Casa de Velázquez prize.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, awards and successes reinforced his talents as a figurative sculptor.

Desperate to find that figurative art was no longer appealing to the public, he abruptly ended his career as a sculptor in the late sixties to devote himself to painting. He even decides to destroy some of his sculptures, which were then saved and hidden by his wife and friend, the sculptor Volti. The secret of his work preservation was revealed to him shortly before his death in 1990. His artwork is therefore rare but powerful and elegant. One of his bronze sculpture can be admired on the south terrace of Château Vullierens since the summer 2018.

Allen Jones was born in 1937 in Southampton, England. He studied painting and lithography at Hornsey College of Art, London before enrolling at the Royal College of Art.  In 1963 Jones received the Prix des Jeunes Artistes at the Paris Biennale, and in 1986 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts. From 1990 – 99 he was a trustee of the British Museum, London.

Allen Jones established himself as a controversial Pop artist during the 1960s. He is best known for his steel sculptures, paintings and prints incorporating female figures. His sexually charged early works, with their provocative eroticism, have, over the years, given way to more stylised, lyrical compositions often involving elements of performance such as fashion shows, dancing and cabaret.

Jones has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including a number of major touring retrospectives of his work. His work is held by numerous museum collections including the British Museum, London; Tate, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Chicago Museum of Art; Fogg Art Museum, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Vancouver Art Gallery and Nagaoka Museum, Japan.

Allen Jones lives and works in London.

His piece « Femme Assise » in red steel is shown in the garden since 2018.

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