Sculpture parks

By Limelight Arts Travel staff

In Western Europe from the sixteenth century, delighting and surprising garden visitors led to the creation of extraordinary places. At Tivoli near Rome, for example, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este diverted a stream – the water source for an entire village – to supply hundreds of fountains (some of which turned on at inopportune moments). In England, celebrated Stourhead reproduces scenes from works by Claude Lorraine, and includes both a Pantheon and a Temple to Flora.

These monuments from the past are magnificent and delight visitors to this day. In many ways, the contemporary equivalent is the sculpture park, where monumental pieces work in unison with the landscape to captivate visitors in novel ways.

In the great sculpture parks of today, there is rarely any accident in the placement of the artworks. Just as in the gardens of old, they are sited to elicit a specific response from the visitor – from surprise to awe, laughter or stunned silence. In this article, we take a look at some of our favourite sculpture parks around the world, from McClelland, east of Melbourne, to Japan, Italy and the USA.

Arte Sella - Italy

A narrow road winds its way up into the foothills of the Dolomites to an enclosed alpine valley. Here, among the lush forests and roadside stalls selling cheese and jam, is Arte Sella, an unexpected gem. The park was founded in the 1990s by a local salon of artists, architects, musicians and intellectuals, with the aim of creating a space for reflection on the human relationship with nature through art.

The park focuses on large-scale artworks made from mostly natural materials, as opposed to the more common steel, aluminium and plastic monuments. One of the founding works, Giulio Marui’s Tree Cathedral, was planted in 2011 and is now growing in well. Hornbeam trees are arranged in tight groups to create the pylons and buttresses of a Gothic cathedral, their branches trained to form the vaulting. In summer, the canopy provides dappled shade; in winter the bare beauty of the trees is an ode to the structural beauty of medieval architecture.

Capturing the cycle of growth and hibernation is key to many works at Arte Sella, including one of the most recent commissions: Arcangelo Sassolino’s Physis (2022). This sculpture looks absolutely still at first: two massive pieces of local granite lie on a pair of tracks, connected by a shaft. On one side there is a solar panel; on the other, an electrical box and battery. At night the two pieces of granite are joined together, but from dawn they slowly move apart, reaching their maximum distance at the sun’s zenith, before making their way imperceptibly back to closure again by sunset. The sculpture breathes with our diurnal rhythm;n the deep of winter, when blizzards prevent the sun from penetrating the valley, it hibernates.

Next to it is Eduardo Tresoldi’s Symbiosis (2019), a Renaissance chapel made from open weldmesh boxes. Its walls are slowly being made by the collaboration of curious visitors, who lob stones inside them, and by the accumulation of falling leaves from the tree overhead. Elsewhere, Michelangelo Pistoletto uses grasses and flowering annuals endemic to the valley to create a piece of land art that also renews and dies back with the cycle of the seasons. And in quiet corners, Kengo Kuma’s architectural sculptures, made of wood, age slowly, their patina offset by the green and then orange glow of the foliage as it changes through spring to autumn.

It’s a beautiful place to walk in the tranquillity of the mountains and to reflect on the interaction between human and nature, which is why we take an excursion there on our Venice Biennale tour.

McClelland Sculpture Park - Australia

In Melbourne’s east – not far from where Kath and Kim go shopping – is one of Australia’s finest open-air galleries. This sculpture park began in the 1970s as a way to develop public interest in modernist sculpture, and its collection (as well as commissions from contemporary artists) has benefited over the decades from the help of a former neighbour, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

Here you’ll find the finest collection of modern Australian sculpture. As you wander the grounds with map in hand, you make a journey from abstract steel masterpieces – by Inge King, Norma Redpath, Clement Meadmore and Lenton Parr, for example – to more playfully figurative works – such as Dean Colls’s Rex Australis, a gigantic Corten steel ram skull whose magnificently cantilevered bulk defies gravity.

But perhaps the most entrancing work is Phil Price’s Tree of Life, a 10-metre-high masterpiece of kinetic sculpture, whose 22 steel and carbon fibre leaves and branches dance in the slightest breath of wind. The work had been placed at an intersection of the freeway that connects Melbourne to the Mornington Peninsula, but it proved a distraction to motorists: they were frequently so captivated by the sculpture’s movements that they didn’t notice that the traffic lights had changed to green!

The sculpture now sits on the open lawn at the entrance to the park, and its placement as a crowd-stopper is not accidental. The park itself offers a carefully planned experience that translates the design of the classical Renaissance villa to a specifically Australian vernacular. In a Palladian style, the front third of the site is open, with buffalo lawns, an artificial lake and island, and the driveway leading up to ‘villa’ – in this case a single storey ‘open-extended’ structure housing the café and gallery, whose permanent collection includes works from Rembrandt and Dürer to Yvonne Audette and Patricia Piccinini.

But beyond the more formal, open space of the approach to the ‘villa’ lie the rear two thirds, where an open space dissolves first into yellowing grass and then into the unkempt Australian scrub of the villa’s bosco. (This stylised ‘wood’ of the Renaissance villa was also transposed into the English garden tradition.) At McClelland, this section is made for wandering, with sculptures of all varieties hidden in the thickets, providing surprise and delight by turn – like the follies of a Renaissance prelate or an aristocratic garden by Capability Brown.

Naoshima & the ‘Art Islands’ of the Inland Sea - JAPAN

Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin on Naoshima

After the Fukutake publishing house was founded in Japan in 1955, its operations grew and it expanded to include Berlitz language schools, correspondence courses and hundreds of nursing homes. When the founder died of a heart attack, his son Soichiro Fukutake changed the company’s name to Benesse, a contraction of the Latin for “well being”, and began developing numerous philanthropic projects that focused on physical, mental and emotional well being – especially as connected to art.

Fukutake had a particular interest in a group of islands in the Seto Inland Sea. Despite their picturesque and remote location, these had been industrialised and, as manufacturing declined, were increasingly degraded and depopulated. Determined to rehabilitate the land and encourage villagers to return, Fukutake set to work with architect Tadao Ando, transforming a number of the islands into a desirable destination for art and nature lovers. “The art, the building and the environment should work together,” Fukutake told Forbes in 2015, “to wake up the viewer.”

This is certainly true on Naoshima, one of these so-called ‘art islands’. Ando’s minimalist, concrete buildings nestle within natural declivities or are even entirely underground: for example at the Chichu Art Museum, a stunning large structure dedicated to a handful of perfect works by Claude Monet, James Turrell and Walter de Maria. “Chichu” means “underground” in Japanese, and this museum is lit only by natural light thanks to its skylights. In aerial images, one sees a collection of geometric shapes – a triangle, some rectangles, a square; a perspective that makes sense when you know that Fukutake selected many of the museum sites from a helicopter.

Naoshima also includes Benesse House, both boutique hotel and art museum; the Lee Ufan Museum, entirely dedicated to the work of this minimalist Korean artist; and the art project of Honmura. Due to the depopulation of this fishing village, a number of its abandoned traditional houses were turned into ‘art house projects’, often with a focus on light, optical illusions, or the passage of time. And a famous Naoshima wharf is also the location for one of Yayoi Kusama’s cheerful spotted Pumpkin sculptures; swept away by a typhoon in 2021, it has since been reinstalled.

While his love for nature eventually took Fukutake to a semi-permanent residence in New Zealand, he has not neglected the islands of the Seto Inland Sea. While Teshima and Inujima are further flung than Naoshima, they too offer extraordinary rewards. Teshima, for example, is still covered in rice paddies but also hosts a moving collaboration by architect Ryue Nishizawa and artist Rei Naito. In a simple concrete shell, wind, sound and light turn an oval-shaped, womb-like space into an evocation of the seasons and time – all through materials as simple as water droplets and gossamer threads.

The ‘art islands’ of the Seto Inland Sea are a centrepiece for our upcoming tour, South Korea and Japan. Register your interest here.

Vitra Design Campus - Germany (just – it’s 15 minutes from Swiss Basel!)

Vitra manufactures furniture to the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, Panton, Noguchi and a host of others. After a factory fire in 1981, the company sought out ‘starchitects’ to design a new complex of buildings, beginning with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw and Frank Gehry. The project evolved in the 1990s and a host of other established and emerging architects came on board, from Zaha Hadid (with Fire Station, 1993 – the first of her designs to be built), Tadao Ando, Álvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and most recently Japan’s SANAA.

In many ways, Vitra is an extraordinary open-air gallery of architecture-as-sculpture, set in an open space of green fields that allows you to view it properly from near and far. But commissioning a wonderful collection of purpose-built structures, including two excellent design museums, wasn’t enough: Vitra began to collect architecture. Today, this includes a 1953 petrol station, designed by Jean Prouvé, an original geodesic dome from Detroit, by Richard Buckminster Fuller, a Shinohara Umbrella House from 1961, and proof-of-concept designs by Renzo Piano and others.

One of the most recent additions is an extensive garden by Piet Oudolf. This was commissioned partly in recognition of gardens as a highly desirable form of domestic design, but also because of an environmental project adopted by Vitra. Oudolf’s gardens use endemic flowering annuals and grasses to create a space that is both relaxing and beautiful for its human visitors, and full of sustenance for bees and other native pollinators. Vitra has extended this project by returning the manicured lawns to European meadows.

If you feel like a coffee break while exploring the campus, stop in at an original 1968 Airstream Kiosk, found in a barn in Nevada. And if you’re taking public transport back to Basel – the closest city, despite the campus being located in Germany – then you’ll wait in a bus stop designed by Jasper Morrison, and rest on seats by Charles and Ray Eames. For any lover of architecture and design, Vitra Design Campus is a must. You can register your interest to visit on our Art Basel, Zurich & Milan tour in 2024.

Storm King ART CENTER - USA

The Hudson River, north of New York City, surrounded by rolling hills offering elevated views, is sometimes called “America’s Rhine”. The beautiful landscape inspired a nineteenth-century school of Romantic landscape painting and, thanks to its proximity to New York City, has now become a burgeoning arts destination. Contemporary galleries such as Dia:Beacon – which occupies an old Nabisco factory and shows large-scale works by Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt – have put it firmly on the art world map.

Of these Hudson Valley meccas, we find Storm King Art Center the most inspiring. It grew after 1960, when Ralph E. “Ted” Ogden – the owner of a family business manufacturing metal fasteners – purchased a 180-acre estate in Mountainville. In addition to his collection of Hudson River School paintings, Ted began to show the public his small-scale sculptures, and, after his death in 1974, his son-in-law and artistic collaborator H. Peter Stern began to focus on how monumental sculptures and land art could sit perfectly within the landscape.

The collection at Storm King is staggering. There are four enormous works in painted sheet metal by Alexander Calder, biomorphic creatures that advance across the site’s rolling green hills. Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield covers four acres, a reclamation of a former gravel pit that sees seven rows of undulating earth and grass mimic the sensation of immersion in a choppy ocean. Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall is his largest single installation to date, a dry-stone wall that snakes its way almost 700 metres through the art centre’s woods, around the pre-existing trees and down to a pond, before it clambers up the other side.

Storm King Art Center shows over 155 sculptures in its sprawling grounds – from large works by Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson and Isamu Noguchi, down to smaller pieces by Anish Kapoor and Nam June Paik – and a small train travels around the site to facilitate viewing. The heavily wooded hills that surround Storm King on all sides, and the meadow-style grasses and flowers, mean that the estate is a stunning green oasis when it opens every spring. But for our money, the most spectacular time to visit is autumn: that’s when it becomes clear how the reds, oranges and yellows, chosen by artists like Calder, Rashid Johnson and Kapoor, are amplified by the glowing russets of the thousands of deciduous trees.