Nico Vascellari — Nido (2026)

Nico Vascellari (b. 1976, Vittorio Veneto) is among the most recognisable Italian artists of his generation, an author whose practice moves between sculpture, installation, performance, video and sound. Organic matter, raw materials and objects drawn from the natural world are routinely withdrawn from their original function and turned into presences charged with meaning, so that the boundary between the natural environment and human intervention becomes a field of tension, capable of evoking belonging, protection, transformation and fragility.

Nido (2026) places a real bird's nest at the centre of the composition, held in glue and set within a wooden structure and a frame conceived by the artist. The object that instinct builds to shelter and generate life is preserved rather than left to decay: its fragility is set against the solidity of the wood and the scale of the work — more than two metres across — producing a tension between what is ephemeral and what is held in time.

The frame is not a display device but a component of the work: a physical environment in which the natural fragment is isolated and observed almost as a relic. What would normally remain hidden among branches is brought in front of the viewer and acquires a new monumentality, while the material keeps its own history, its irregularities and its fragility as the trace of something that existed before the artist intervened.

The work belongs to the line of research in which Vascellari addresses the relationship between nature, ritual, memory and human presence. The nest reads as a symbol of home, origin, protection and belonging, and at the same time as an image of precariousness: a structure of extreme fragility capable of guarding life. Vascellari represented Italy at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and his research has been presented in museums and foundations dedicated to contemporary art in Italy and abroad — an institutional position that underpins the demand for his unique sculptural works.