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.

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.

Tim Etchells (UK, 1962) lives and works between London and Sheffield. Exploring contradictory aspects of language in playful and poetic ways, Etchells has created a considerable oeuvre in neon and LED sculpture, as well as video, drawing and performance. Infiltrating galleries, street corners, shop windows, rooftops and other locations, Etchells’ works often spell out simple-but-intriguing phrases, messages and instructions which appear to address the viewer directly. He’s interested to create moments of thoughtfulness and playful encounter in a public setting; the work is public but private at the same time, a dialogue with context that tries to draw each person encountering it into a space of intimate reflection and speculation. 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.

Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981) lives and works in Milan. At the heart 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: Italian Cultural Institute, London (2024); Estorick collection of Italian modern art, London (2024); 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 Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA), Riyadh Saudi Arabia (2024); Premio di Grafica Santa Croce, Santa Croce sull’Arno, Pisa; Studio la Città, Verona; Societé Interludio, Turin; Circolo, Milan; Villa Croce Museo d’arte Contemporanea, Genova (2023); Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio (2022); Fondazione Malvina Menegaz, Castelbasso (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.