Good Company

Vlatka Horvat (Čakovec, Croatia, 1974) works across a wide range of forms, from sculpture, installation, drawing, collage and photography to performance, video, writing and publishing. Her practice investigates the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, the built environment and nature by reimagining and redrawing the physical, social, psychological and environmental boundaries experienced in our everyday lives. She is particularly drawn to what she thinks of as ‘problematic’ or dysfunctional set of relations, whereby things like balance or stability become compromised, and where the habitual function of objects is playfully messed with.

In her work Horvat frequently enacts reversals and inversions of established spatial and social order. She is interested in how things occupy, negotiate and share space, and how gestures of organizing and reorganizing spatial relations also perform a certain reordering of social dynamics. Horvat’s works tend to have a speculative or propositional quality, and frequently deal with the possibility of transformation and change. Many of her projects are organized around a set of self-imposed restrictions, a rule-based framework of sorts within which her investigations take place. The artist stages a meeting between her own system of rules and the open-ended, playful, improvisatory activity that she pursues inside it.

Her upcoming project is By the Means at Hand for the Croatian Pavillion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (opening 17 April, 2024).

Vlatka Horvat lives and works in London, where she moved after spending twenty years in the US. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Ebensperger, Berlin (with Tim Etchells), Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, PUBLICS, Helsinki (solo, alongside Maarit Mustonen), Renata Fabbri, Milan (with Tim Etchells), annex14, Zurich (with Simon Callery),  Phoinix, Bratislava (2023);  Galerija Nova, Zagreb, PEER, London (2022); GAEP Gallery, Bucharest (2020); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2017); Zak | Branicka Gallery, Berlin (2015 and 2011). She has realized projects and installations for Kunsthalle Wien, Zurcher Theater Spektakel, the Pavilion of Croatia at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, VOLT (Bergen), Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (NY), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow), Marta Herford Museum (Herford), Kunsthalle Osnabrück, the 53rd October Salon (Belgrade), Stroom (The Hague), MoMA PS1 (NYC), MGLC and Galerija Skuc (both Ljubljana), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya) and the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Her performances have been commissioned by venues across Europe, North America and beyond. She teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts, London.