Peer was pleased to present an exhibition of ambitious new work by Vlatka Horvat (b. 1974, Croatia). Horvat is a London-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, collage, video, and photography, as well as performance, writing, and public interventions. Across different forms and media, Horvat investigates the precarious relationships between bodies, objects, the built environment, and nature by redrawing and reimagining the physical, social, and environmental boundaries experienced in our everyday lives. Her work frequently explores how we occupy, share, and navigate spaces and structures.

Having exhibited extensively across Europe, USA and further afield, this will be Horvat’s first solo exhibition in London, where she has lived for more than a decade. Central to the exhibition at Peer will be an epic series titled To See Stars over Mountains (2021), consisting of 365 works on paper – one produced for every day of 2021. Each work in the series starts with a photograph the artist has taken on her daily excursions, which she then playfully and radically reimagines through different interventions – cutting or tearing the paper, collaging, and drawing onto the image. The resulting works mirror, amplify, extend, repeat, and morph aspects of the landscape, transforming mundane everyday scenes into exciting new utopias, or disturbing dystopias – all offering new, boundless possibilities. Produced during a period in which we experienced unprecedented restriction in our daily lives, the work explores our relationship to the local and the everyday, encouraging us to consider our own impact on, and agency over, the spaces we inhabit.

The work was presented in seven instalments across the duration of the exhibition, each displaying 53 images from the series, running in a linear chronological order around the second gallery space at Peer – an entire year unfolding over the course of eight weeks. To See Stars over Mountains will also be presented as an artist book documenting the entire series of 365 images, alongside a text by the writer Lauren Elkin (author of No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute, and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City) written in response to the project. The 376-page book, published as a collaboration between Peer and Unstable Object, will launch at the opening of the exhibition and will be available to purchase at Peer and online.

Alongside works on paper, Horvat presented a site-responsive sculptural installation that will dominate the first gallery space. Made using simple found and commonplace materials, the work will push and probe at the edges of the built environment; encompassing it and challenging its confines. Horvat’s sculptural installations regularly reconsider limits and boundaries. By creating physical barriers or intrusions into the architecture, Horvat directly addresses the possibilities and problems of inhabiting and negotiating space, and the effects that this can have on social structures, systems of exchange, and encounters with people and place.

The exhibition included Horvat’s recent video work, titled Until the Last of Our Labours Is Done (2021), filmed in the same fields which feature repeatedly in the series To See Stars over Mountains. The 24-minute film follows a handful of lone figures as they travel through the deserted landscape, pushing, rolling, and dragging a series of miscellaneous objects in a playful yet apparently purposeless labour. The film reflected on the relationship between humans, objects, and nature: on our overwhelming desire to control and manipulate the world around us and the undeniable reality that our future and our destination are both unknown and out of reach.
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Vlatka Horvat – Around Here, 2021
Inkjet photo collage
Series of 12 unique collages

In conjunction with her upcoming solo exhibition, Vlatka Horvat has produced a series of twelve unique works on paper. Titled Around Here, the series sits in relation to a larger body of work by Horvat, To See Stars over Mountains, which will be included in the exhibition.

This limited edition series mirrors the logic of To See Stars over Mountains but deploys it within a different temporal frame. While the larger series was produced one per day over the course of an entire year, the images that make up Around Here were taken on a single day, during an hour-long walk in Horvat’s North London neighbourhood.

In Around Here, the interventions the artist has enacted upon the twelve photographs centre on a singular gesture of tearing the photographic print by hand, whereby the rough torn edge appears as a continuation of certain lines and shapes found in the photograph. Via the tear, the trace of action and the materiality of paper both become part of a transformed image, a captured photographic moment which is expanded to create new visual and imaginative possibilities.


Biography:

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Vlatka Horvat was born in Croatia but moved to the US as a teenager and spent 20 years there. She currently lives in London, where she teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.  She holds a BA in Theater from Columbia College Chicago, an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and a PhD from Roehampton University in London. Horvat works across a wide range of forms, including sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, photography, video and writing. Her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, theatre and dance festivals and in public space. Recent solo exhibitions and commissioned projects include: Kunsthalle Wien, the Pavilion of Croatia at the 16th Architecture Biennale, Museums Sheffield, Theater Spektakel Zurich, Renata Fabbri gallery (Milan), GAEP Gallery (Bucharest), Marta Herford Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (upstate NY), Stroom (The Hague), Wilfried Lentz Gallery (Rotterdam), CAPRI (Düsseldorf), Bergen Kunsthall, the Kitchen and MoMA PS1 (both NYC), etc. Her performances have been commissioned by venues across Europe, North America and beyond, including HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), LIFT – London International Festival of Theatre, PACT Zollverein (Essen), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Outpost for Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen (Hannover) and many others. Her work in visual art is represented by GAEP Gallery (Bucharest), Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea (Milan) and annex14 (Zurich). She also writes fiction; her short stories were recently published by Nightjar Press, minor literatures, and the Vassar Review.

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