Vlatka Horvat

[...]In her photographs and collages, Vlatka Horvat focuses on the spectacle of the defamiliarized body, staging her own body in repeated transformations, reinventions, and pictorial erasures. Often done in a series, Horvat’s work suggests an obsessive, never-resolved desire to distinguish the body from the environment it inhabits and decipher its place on the continuum between subject and object. This territory is mined in a series of photographs in which the artist conceals herself within ten different packages, from a cardboard box to aluminum foil to a vivid cloth sack. Invoking opposing notions of protection and vulnerability, mobility and constraint, the series’ enigmatic tone provides no obvious solutions for an efficient unpacking. This inscrutability continues to be apparent in an unretouched photographic triptych, where the artist’s body performs acrobatic feats of semi-disappearance behind a pillar in a room that she occupies. And in Horvat’s collage work, odd, unrecognizable Dada-like creatures, remixed from a wealth of her existing photographic imagery, not only split the difference between animate and inanimate, but also narrow the gap between the subhuman and the superhuman. The jarring image of a partial feminine form tacked onto a bicycle wheel, a fire hydrant or a giant light bulb stresses the (female) body’s predicament – its reduction, failure and oppression – but also the expansive imaginative possibilities its hybridity seems to provide. [...]

Vlatka Horvat’s work has recently been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, White Columns, NY, Anna Kustera Gallery, NY, Kunsthaus Graz, as well as in the festivals Home Works IV, Beirut and Art Sheffield 08. In 2009, her work will be shown at The Kitchen, NY, and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. She was born in Cakovec, Croatia, and lives and works in New York, NY.[...]

Extrait du Communiqué de Presse de l’exposition "Jennifer Cohen and Vlatka Horvat" (07/11/2008 - 21/12/2008) - Rachel Uttner Gallery (New York, NY, USA)