Surroundings

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.