DIANA VIVES

(b. 1967 Switzerland) 

Practicing primarily as a sculptor, Diana Vives uses natural and salvaged materials to create work that departs from the personal in search of connective threads to mediate the rift between nature and culture. Her creative process combines multidisciplinary research with a devotion to craft and a respect for the inherent power of materials. Engaging the past as an active aspect of the present, these contribute their own complex histories of climate, displacement and exploitation to her work. Artists of the Mono-ha and Arte Povera movements have been formative influences.

Her position is one of pluralism and relational belonging, shaped by a polycultural background. Born in Sao Paolo and raised between Brazil and Switzerland, Vives is a Swiss national with Spanish, Scottish and Greek origins from Alexandria, Egypt. She has lived on four continents and spent over twenty years in South Africa. She holds multiple degrees, including in Political Science (Cambridge) and an MBA (UCT).

Starting in 2020, Vives formalised her longstanding professional interest and practice of art by completing two postgraduate degrees in sculpture at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (both obtained with distinctions). Her supervisors were artists Jane Alexander and Kurt Campbell. Her MFA project, titled The Fire in The Mind (2023), imagines the contagion between inner and outer fires in an ecology of entangled matter, and draws on themes of memory, myth and language as forms of cultural geology.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024

The Fire in the Mind, Everard Read Cape Town

The Fire in the Mind, Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town

2022 Diana Vives: Eternal Circumstances, Everard Read Cubicle

2020 Nobody, Nowhere, Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024

Approximations to a voice: Ellipsis, Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery

2023

Layers: Rock Art across Space and Time, Origins Centre (Wits), South Africa

Artwords, Gallery Glen Carlou, South Africa

Oddkin, Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town

Layers: Rock Art across Space and Time, Boschendal X Brundyn       

2022   

Layers: Rock Art Across Space & Time, Nirox Sculpture Park

Death Row Dinner, The Fourth, Cape Town