Inside, it’s a plain, long, cool rectangle, a little shock of relief from the thumping summer heat of a Provençal hillside. Straight ahead, a wall of glass frames a spectacular panorama of the hills beyond — a sight glorious enough to detract from the art on the walls of this, the new Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery in the grounds of Château La Coste, just 15km north of Aix-en-Provence. At its entrance, it’s pure signature Rogers — a smack of bright orange in the middle of these rolling vineyards and pine-covered hills, a hefty orange “skeleton”, with its mighty bolts and joints, inside which the delicate glass box that is the gallery seems to hover.
But there’s more to this, the last work made by the great architect before his retirement — what appears simple is far from that, and contains a startling surprise too. In fact, the whole structure rests on just four rather small footings at the entrance and the rest, all 27 metres of it, is cantilevered out, dizzyingly high, floating over the escarpment of the hillside. A truly dramatic work for a dramatic setting.
If this sounds incongruous, set among the traditional rolling vineyards of Provence, it’s certainly not alone. To call Château La Coste a sculpture park would be to undersell it. The brainchild of Irish businessman Paddy McKillen, it is not just a working vineyard producing biodynamic wines, tasting facilities and a clutch of restaurants, galleries and more. It is also home to a range of ambitious architectural bonnes bouches from some of the greatest names in the profession.
Here, for instance, what seems from a distance to be a giant pile of sticks is Frank Gehry’s 2008 pavilion created for the Serpentine Gallery in London, and here given its permanent home. Sited in a natural dip, the grassy slope around it has been landscaped into amphitheatre seating terraces, for performances within the loose structure.
The main working buildings at Château La Coste also draw on great architectural names. The main centre for visitors is a low white asymmetrical assemblage by Tadao Ando housing a shop, one of the four restaurants here, a ticket office and more. Its sharp edges are reflected, softened, in two great pools that surround it: standing with its feet in one of them is a mighty Alexander Calder mobile, to the other side a shimmering metal spike by Hiroshi Sugimoto seems to rise from the water, while a third piece, a spider by Louise Bourgeois, crouches low against the background of hills.
Already you know you’re among some of the world’s greatest sculptures, and when suddenly you realise that this expanse of water, in which contemporary art proves only the best kind of shock against the age-old landscape, actually forms the roof of the invisible visitors’ car park, you see the complex thought behind the apparent ease and simplicity.
Even the working section of the winery that produces Château La Coste’s biodynamic wines is architecturally remarkable — a smooth, steely curve by French star Jean Nouvel.
From the central hub, wine-tasters and restaurant-goers don’t have far to stroll, as within a few yards you can eat Provençal, Italian or Argentine, taste the vintages, and hang out under the spreading trees among the original farm buildings surrounding the old bastide.
But art lovers? We walk. And walk. Along the paths that wind through the neat corduroy carpet of the vines and up into the wooded hills, finding the treasures as we go across the full 500 acres of this domain. Everything here is at scale. A serpentine stone path-wall built by Ai Weiwei winds down one slope; Conrad Shawcross’s hefty metal polyhedron seems to perch on a ledge under leaning pines. Michael Stipe plays to the setting with a flock of foxes. Kengo Kuma’s mysterious wooden abstract juts geometrically out into a clearing — is it a subtle play on the idea of a pile of logs in the wood? A searing yellow phallic Franz West, entitled “Faux Pas”, occupies one clearing; in another, Paul Matisse has constructed a “Meditation Bell”, an astonishing, lingering sound piece that can compete with the chattering of the crickets in the surrounding trees.
To escape the heat we can dive down into a hobbit-like bower of branches, Andy Goldsworthy’s 2009 “Oak Room” or, going even further with the prevailing theme of peace and meditation, enter the lovely gloom of Lee Ufan’s “House of Air” with its surround of raked gravel topped by a single natural stone, like a scholar’s rock.
Although most of the pieces here are very large, architectural in ambition, and many are full structures — one a whole chapel, another a traditional Vietnamese sacred space, Tia-Thuy Nguyen’s “Silver Room” — there are also hidden corners, small secrets to discover. Tracey Emin has created a “self-portrait”, in fact a sort of narrow wooden pontoon path that leads to a lookout point — to tell you where the tiny self-portrait is would be a spoiler. Elsewhere, the faded letters on a rough-hewn sign nailed to a tree inform you of a “Dead End”.
There is much more to discover. It’s more than the work of a single day, for most people. And when sculpture-hunters are too footsore to continue on the hillsides, there are the galleries. Château La Coste hosts a full rolling programme of curated exhibitions, under its art director Daniel Kennedy: at my visit, one of the older buildings had a rich display of Giacometti drawings; that space has just opened a piece by the land artist Richard Long, made of local materials.
But my chief quest was an exhibition by American artist Roni Horn. Along another path through the vines, another architectural surprise is in store: a gallery built into the side of hilly slope, quasi-submerged on one side, opening to another vista on the other, created just a few years ago by Renzo Piano. Natural light pours into a simple, high space, and here the curator Jerry Gorovoy has placed the first of Horn’s sculptural works, a pair of giant oil drum-like pieces — solid, elemental, elusive. “Water Double”, as it’s called, is in fact made of glass, oddly juxtaposing the massive qualities of this 10-ton installation with the essentially fragile nature of its material.
Horn makes work in photography, sculpture, installation, painting, collage and other media. Literature is always hovering around her — she is also a writer — and this show is entitled A Rat Surrendered Here. Anyone who takes her title from a poem by Emily Dickinson must be worth a pilgrimage, and this is no disappointment.
Cleverly, the glorious light and height of the main rooms of Piano’s gallery is contrasted here by the use of a gloomy concrete-walled side-passage, where a series entitled “Still Life”, Horn’s hard-hitting photographs of water — in fact, the river Thames at its angriest — are hung. These are so detailed and unrelieved that they morph, under our gaze, into other natural phenomena: losing all sense of scale they might be lunar landscapes, or geological formations seen from an aeroplane, or the close-ups of a muddy puddle. But they are never less than disturbing, ominous, uncontrolled.
Light and gloom; life and mortality: the inalienable themes, especially of Horn’s work (as well as Dickinson’s). Word-pieces, the lettering on wooden sticks propped as if casually against the bare concrete walls, proclaim the mood: “There is a solitude of space/a solitude of death/compared with that profounder site/that polar site/finite infinity”, parts of another of Dickinson’s poems.
In another line of that same poem she describes “a soul admitted to itself”. There’s no doubt: in the midst of all this greenery and glory, the blue sky and singing birds and burgeoning vines, Horn is talking about dying, about the imminence of our end. Still life, nature morte, as the French have it. Her river pictures echo reports of the finding of drowned bodies: the water rages on, impenetrable, oblivious to the passing of human life. Her ongoing preoccupation with doubles and pairings — the two glass drums, and other pieces — is another reference to mortality: the doppelgänger, the uncanny twin that walks beside us.
It is a surprising show, perhaps, for this sunny place dedicated to the good things in life, but it’s perhaps the more impactful for that. Sparse, beautifully chosen and put together, it’s powerful and thought-provoking in equal measure as we emerge into the sunny surroundings, where the nature is definitely not morte and wine, food and art seem more vivid than ever.
The creator of all this — the vineyards, the wine production, the collection of art and architecture, the four restaurants — McKillen is an international hotelier and property investor, the Connaught, the Berkeley and Claridges forming part of his portfolio. So it would be surprising if Château La Coste, which McKillen acquired as a working vineyard in 2002 and has developed continuously ever since, didn’t boast at least one hotel. Sure enough, it does.
Perched towards the highest part of the area, with astonishing views across a panoramic landscape, is the super-luxe Villa La Coste, a stunning hotel. The rooms and other spaces are dotted with more works of art from McKillen’s collection — nothing anodyne here, plenty of challenging pieces — and to greet visitors as they alight from their cars is a chunky bronze figure by Tracey Emin, truncated, twisting, elemental, another reminder of nature morte in the midst of luxurious life.
‘A Rat Surrendered Here’ runs until October 24; chateau-la-coste.com
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Château La Coste — no ordinary sculpture park
Château La Coste — no ordinary sculpture park