2009-18
Counterpoise Table, 2018
Wooden table, wooden sticks, door stoppers, various objects
To Get Over, 2018
Wood-and-metal tables, wooden sticks
Stacks Table, 2018
Wooden table, felt
Overhang Table, 2018
Wooden table, felt
Wooden Legs, 2018
Wooden table legs
No Leg to Stand On, 2018
Modified wooden tabletops
Installation views from Vlatka Horvat: Supporting Objects at Eastwards Prospectus, Bucharest
Set Right (Table Leg), 2016
Set Right (Tabletop), 2016
Modified wooden table, corrugated cardboard, electrical tape
Installation views from Vlatka Horvat: Means and Ends at Wilfied Lentz Gallery, Rotterdam and Vlatka Horvat: Surroundings at Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea, Milan
In Set Right Horvat first cuts up wooden tables, removing certain parts from them – the table top in one instance and a leg in another – and then performs the gesture of “repairing” the missing parts of these objects with cardboard strips – once again using a temporary material, decidedly inadequate for the job. In this process the tables are altered from functional everyday objects into non-utilitarian ones. The line used to “repair” or complete them creates here a field of action that is simultaneously material and imaginary, as the lines extend, re-frame and re-imagine the tables as hollow 3-dimensional line drawings in space, marking out the boundaries of newly created enterable spaces.
Peripheral Awareness, 2014-16
Wooden table, various objects
Installation views from Vlatka Horvat: According to Plan at MMC Luka, Pula and Vlatka Horvat: Immeasurables at Zak | Branicka, Berlin
In Peripheral Awareness, a range of round or tubular objects are placed at the very edges of a table, precariously stopped at the table’s brink, apparently caught at a precipice – still on “solid ground” but in a state/place where a potential fall or a collapse seems imminent.
The work addresses the edges / limits / margins of inhabitable space and of physical objects more broadly, as various round items are made to inhabit the surface of the table in a dysfunctional way: all lined up along the periphery, while leaving the middle unoccupied. The safety of the middle, or the stability of the centre is apparently replaced with the state of danger as the possibility of objects rolling over hangs in the air. An almost certain “going over the edge” (in both literal and metaphorical sense) is floated here as the placement of small objects explicitly raises the question of the edges or the margins of space and objects as sites where activity can be (permanently) situated. The stable and safe centre in this work becomes a site of abandonment – evacuated and deserted – while the edges become sites of activity, enlivened with the presence of objects occupying it, but which are constantly hanging in a precarious balance between stability and the potential fall.
Loop Table, 2012
Modified wooden table frame, foam
Table Forest, 2009
Modified wood-and-steel table, inkjet print on paper mounted on masonite box
Installation views from Vlatka Horvat: Or Some Other Time at the Kitchen, NYC
Table Forest is a hybrid sculptural object comprising a worktable with a faux wood laminate surface and an upright masonite box with a photographic print of a forest, spatially piercing through the tabletop in which a through-cut has been made.
Both unstable objects on their own – the mounted print too tall and thin to stand upright on its own and the table’s stability compromised by the cut – the print and the table sit in a kind of a mutually dependent spatial relation, providing structural support to one another, whilst at the same time interrupting the other object’s surface. The two objects at the same time cut into and fit into one another: the masonite-mounted print cuts through the surface of the table into which it’s inserted, interrupting the lines of its wood laminate and in turn the table severs horizontally the photographic representation of a forest – which itself is a heavily worked on, aesthetically rugged digital composite. Intruding and intervening spatially upon one another, the surfaces of these two objects appear to be performing a game of mirroring or repetition – our eye moves from the photographic print of a forest to the faux wood laminate – both in different ways compromised and inadequate representations of something natural.
