The catalogue of the retrospective exhibition of Davide Rivalta’s works is located at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. The main focus of the exhibition is the personal figurative portrayal of his favourite subject, the animal world.
His bronze sculptures express an “otherness”; rather than appearing to render animals according to traditional and imitative criteria, he seems to make them alive in some different way. Rivalta manages to portray these animals both present and distant at the same time: a buffalo, a rhinoceros, or a wolf, creating a magnificently alien effect with unusual techniques. He incorporates half-formed sculptural expression into another dimension of the untamed essence of the animal, with all its fearless energy from another age, in a wild primitive invasion of spaces transformed from parks into savanna. But there are not only sculptures: the exhibition rooms below ground level display site-specific drawings of large birds roughly sketched onto the walls, integrating the sculptor’s graphic talent and expressing the strength of his work.

Davide Rivalta was born in Bologna 1974, this is where he currently still lives. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in that city, where he presently teaches. His career began in 1998 with the victory in the competition for the insertion of a work of art in the courtyard of the Palazzo di Giustizia in Ravenna. His preferred media are sculpture, drawing and painting. His works are permanently installed in Italy and abroad. He has exhibited work in art institutions and museums. In 2010 he took part in the first Aichi Triennale, Arts and Cities in Nagoya, and then in Arte alle Corti in Turin, Monumenta in Mougins and Biennale Disegno Rimini 2016, and the 22nd Milan Triennale in 2019. In 2017 he began to occupy various areas of urban environments with his work, in a sort of scattered, discreet infiltration of the city: first Antibes, then Neuchâtel in 2018 and Gstaad in 2018-2019, and again Gstaad in December 2019. That same year he created the largest installation in terms of number of works in a unique setting: the biggest cemetery in all of Switzerland, the Friedhof am Hörnli in Riehen. Among others, Dede Auregli, Anna Daneri, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Marinella Paderni, Alessandro Sarri, Davide Ferri, Sergio Risaliti, Guido Molinari, Paolo Parisi, Laura Barreca, Pietro Gaglianò, Cristiana Collu, Angelika Stepken, Margherita de Pilati, Eleonora Frattarolo, Saretto Cincinelli and Gabriele Detterer have written about his work.