|Reſlections| Above: Not Vital’s Josüjo (2008) – a house that disappears into the ground at the push of a button – at his sculpture park, Parkin Sent; top: inside the art-filled Villa Flor hotel in S-chanf, with a work by late Czech photographer and painter Miroslav Tichý front and centre whose foundation embraces a sculpture park there, an exhibition space in Ardez and, most strikingly, a castle, Schloss Tarasp (notvital.ch), just above the village of Scuol, which lies at the end of the train line, barely 15 kilometres from the Austrian and Italian borders. It is an extraordinary place: an 11th-century mountaintop fastness renovated during the last century by a German industrialist, Karl August Lingner, who paid for it with the fortune he amassed as the inventor of Odol mouthwash. (Hygiene was clearly important to him because the schloss’s early-20th-century bathrooms are something to behold!) Vital acquired it in 2016 and has filled it and its grounds with his own art (not least one of his Houses to Watch the Sunset, a four-storey tower buttressed by three precarious-to-ascend staircases, each leading to a different floor), as well as treasures from his own collection. These range from suits of armour and antiquities to works by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol, all of whom Vital knew in 1970s New York. But he has work by other artists, too, among them Max Ernst, Piero Manzoni, Giorgio Morandi and Richard Long, whose serpentine installation River of Riverstones in the castle’s grounds was made from pebbles from the Inn, a tributary of the Danube that flows through the valley. There’s no denying that most of the art on view in the Engadin has been made by white male artists, but in . 2019, the collector Grazyna Kulczyk, the entrepreneur behind, among other developments, the Stary Browar shopping mall and art centre in Poznán in her native Poland, opened Muzeum Susch (muzeumsusch.ch) on the banks of the river in Susch (nine stops on the train from St Moritz). Its mission is to showcase the work of female artists, to create, she says, “a laboratory of art, where women take centre stage”. (Opening in January, this winter’s show will survey the work of the late Estonian artist Anu Põder.) Whatever it’s showing, the riverside museum is also worth a look for its architecture. Converted from a 12thcentury monastery and a handsome former brewery that have been ingeniously linked by an underground tunnel, its galleries are not just polished white cubes, their windows framing glorious valley views as though they were pictures in themselves, but raw, rough-hewn cellar-like spaces dug out from the mountain that rises behind it, an undertaking that involved the removal of 9,000 tonnes of rock. But what really made it “the ideal setting for what I was envisioning,” Kulczyk says, is its “central position in Europe, both geographically and as a destination for intellectuals seeking reflection”. For the Engadin has always been a place where ideals abut and cultures collide, where Italy’s warm south meets cool Calvinist Switzerland and the churches are as likely to have austere Gothic spires as Baroque onion domes. As Hauser & Wirth’s Giorgia von Albertini, whose family comes from La Punt, explains, its rich history as a trade route dates back to Roman times. “So it’s not just the light and the scenery,” she says, that make it such “a very special place”. PHOTOS FROM TOP: MANOLO YLLERA, ERIC GREGORY POWELL 68 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
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