Artissima 2023

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.

Vlatka Horvat lives and works in London, where she moved after spending twenty years in the US. She has had solo exhibitions at PEER, London (2022); GAEP Gallery, Bucharest (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2018); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2017); Museums Sheffield (2017); Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam (2016); CAPRI Raum, Düsseldorf (2016); Zak | Branicka Gallery, Berlin (2015 and 2011); MMC Multimedia Centre, Pula (2014); Galerija SC, Zagreb (2014); Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Oregon (2013); annex14, Zurich (2013 and 2012); Boston University Art Gallery (2012); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2012); Bergen Kunsthall (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); and Galerija Nova, Zagreb (2005). 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. Upcoming projects in 2023 include: Renata Fabbri, Milan (with Tim Etchells); Phoinix, Bratislava (solo); annex14, Zurich (with Simon Callery); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (solo); and PUBLICS, Helsinki (solo, alongside Maarit Mustonen). She teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts, London.

Tim Etchells (UK, 1962) lives and works between London and Sheffield. His practice shifts between the gallery and the public site, live performance and experimental fiction and is concerned with issues of contemporary identity, our relation to fiction and the media as well as with the limits of representation, especially in respect of language. Across the wide range of his work he uses strong, simple and sometimes comical means to get to serious ideas. Etchells has produced major commissions for public space internationally.

His works has been presented in museums, galleries, biennales and fairs, including La Triennale di Milano; Tate Modern, London; Hayward Gallery, London; Gasworks, London; Bloomberg SPACE, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate; BALTIC, Gateshead; Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth; Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz; Jakopič Gallery, Ljubljana; Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow; Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone; Gothenburg International Biennial; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, among others.

The artist has worked in a variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a wide range of musicians, artists and performance makers including Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Marino Formenti, Taus Mahakacheva, Vlatka Horvat, Ant Hampton, Aisha Orazbayeva and Elmgreen & Dragset. Etchells is currently Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University.

Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981) lives and works in Milan. At the core of her artistic practice lies the concept of time, which is explored in its intense symbolic interaction with the materials she employs – mostly ashes of burnt images and pure pigments – and the images created. The change and instability of materials in relation to the flow of time are some of the constants of her artistic research. The Temporal Geographies, for example, provide an exemplification of a series of works eternally suspended between the act of creation and that of destruction, where the image is constantly subjected to a continuous process of modification through the slow and relentless collapse of the material of which it is made. Conceived through a conceptual and formal negotiation between sculpture and painting, these works stage “a bond made of weight, pressure, gravity, and the destruction of time on images, but also of formation, depth, return, and rebirth with respect to the passage of time.” Meaningful  metaphors of the caducity and mutability of existence, her works recall the trajectory of life that we trace, parallel to a slow but persistent collapsing movement.

Recent solo shows include: Renata Fabbri, Milan (2015, 2018 and 2023); Contemporary Locus, Bergamo (2023); Postmasters Rome, with Marta Kucsora (2023); Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2022); EAST Galerie, Strasbourg (2022); Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna (2016 and 2021–22); BUILDINGBOX, Milan (2021); BUILDING Gallery, Milan (2020); Ca’Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice (2019); The OpenBox, Milan (2018). She has participated in group exhibitions at Palazzo Ducale di Gubbio (2022); Fondazione Malvina Menegaz, Castelbasso (2021); Albergo delle Povere, Palermo (promoted by RISO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Sicily, Palermo) (2021); Palazzo Barbò Torre Pallavicina, Bologna (2021); MAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lissone (2021); and Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020), among others. In 2016, Sophie Ko won the Lissone Prize for Painting organized by MAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lissone.