Same River Twice

Renata Fabbri is delighted to announce Same River Twice, a two-person exhibition by Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells. Stemming from a long-lasting collaboration between the two artists – both work and life partners – the show is structured as a close dialogue between Horvat’s new sculptural works and works on paper and Etchells’s new neon pieces.

Linked by their reciprocal interest in the processes of repetition and in the exploration of structures that both produce and eschew variation, the artists employ a range of different media, such as sculpture, performance, writing, drawing, photography and video. The title of the exhibition, Same River Twice, is a fragment of the expression “You can’t step in the same river twice” and speaks to Horvat and Etchells’s shared preoccupation with ideas around change, transformation and instability. It also evokes the flow and movement of nature, bodies, time and language, explored in different ways by the works on show.

Through the interaction of various materials, such as paper, textiles, ceramic, wood and cork, Horvat’s sculptural works refer to gestures of holding, joining and cradling and raise questions around protection, containment and mobility. In several of the works on paper she reworks the page as an object, dismantling and repairing it while materially recording the passing of time. Etchells’s new neon pieces extend his ongoing work on contradictory aspects of language, drawing attention to the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and its simultaneous propensity to create rich fields of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Vlatka Horvat (b. 1974, Croatia) lives and works in London, where she moved after spending twenty years in the US. She works across a wide range of media, from sculpture, installation, drawing, collage and photography to performance, video, writing and publishing. Reconfiguring space and social relations at play in it, her projects often explore the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment and landscape.

Horvat’s work is presented in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, performance venues and festivals and in public space – and is held in many public and private collections. She has had solo exhibitions at PEER, London; GAEP Gallery, Bucharest; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Renata Fabbri, Milan; Museums Sheffield; Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam; CAPRI Raum, Düsseldorf; Zak|Branicka Gallery, Berlin; MMC Multimedia Centre, Pula; Galerija SC, Zagreb; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland; annex14, Zurich; and the Boston University Art Gallery, among others. Her performances have been commissioned by venues across Europe, North America and beyond, including HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; LIFT – International Festival of Theatre, London; PACT Zollverein, Essen; Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna; Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Hannover.
She teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts, London.

Tim Etchells (b. 1962, UK) 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.