SALZBURG.- For the past ten years, it has been a defining highlight of the unique ensemble of architecture, art, and nature atop Salzburg’s Mönchsberg hill: Sleeping House, a work by the acclaimed Swiss artist Not Vital (Sent, CH, 1948). The thirty-three-foot-tall steel wire mesh sculpture arrived at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2010 as a permanent loan from Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and was prominently installed on the plaza next to the museum.

Director Thorsten Sadowsky shared the great news with the public: “The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is proud and grateful to announce the addition of Not Vital’s Sleeping House to its collection, thanks to a generous gift by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.”

Since December 8, 2020, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg mounts Vital’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Austria, which can be seen until June 13, 2021. The sprawling presentation features twenty-one sculptures, three expansive installations that take up entire rooms and walls, and a hundred and forty drawings.

Originally created for an exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, in 2009, Sleeping House came to Salzburg the following year. The distinctive conical sculpture is set apart by a special characteristic: it can lie down in the evening and rise again in the morning. The imposing flexible structure, a hybrid between architecture and sculpture that visitors can enter, strikes an intriguing balance between formal lucidity and referential polyvalence. Salzburg’s only moving work of art in a public setting, Vital’s Sleeping House has become a widely beloved landmark of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

“That is why I am extraordinarily pleased that Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has decided to make a gift of Sleeping House to the museum on occasion of our exhibition Not Vital. IR. On behalf of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, I would like to express my gratitude to Thaddaeus Ropac for this magnificent and magnanimous gesture,” Thorsten Sadowsky adds.