Lara Favaretto

Lara Favaretto (b.1973, Treviso, Italy) lives and works in Turin, Italy. Throughout her career, Favaretto has worked with a range of media, including performance, sculpture, installation, and video. Based on profound conceptual research, Favaretto’s complex artistic practice brings forth works that interact with space, activating the community and setting of a specific place. While Favaretto engages and allures audiences with gestures of the seemingly playful or festive, upon closer examination, her work paradoxically evokes the inevitability of failure and decay.
Favaretto’s installations and audio, sculptural, and kinetic works balance between failure and aspiration. A sense of resignation to the forces of decay and obsolescence runs throughout her work—most visibly in her minimal cubes made of confetti, which decompose during the period of their display. Favaretto represents the eventuality of loss through a recuperative memorialization, often recycling elements from previous installations as new works, reusing discarded industrial materials, and encasing found paintings in loose tapestries of wool yarn. The memorial form is pointedly evoked in a series that the artist calls “momentary monuments,” which loosely adopt but also subvert the vernacular of public sculpture. Beginning with a swamp that she created at the back of the Giardini in Venice to commemorate twenty historical figures who have disappeared, and continuing with her sandbagging of an 1896 statue of Dante Alighieri in a civic square in Trento, she has conceived a series of sculptures and public installations that draw attention to the futility and impermanence of memorials themselves. Favaretto memorializes the body in a similar state of limbo, often through mechanical representations that gradually degrade: car wash brushes whirl repeatedly, wearing themselves down against metal plates; a platoon of compressed air cylinders randomly empties itself, blowing silent party favors. These animist machines celebrate their own absurdity, taking on lives of their own, while also reflecting ours.
Prizes
2011 ‘Premio ACACIA’, Milano, Italy (prize winner)
2008 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA
Hayward Gallery, London, UK
2005 Fleetinsel-Stipendium 2005, Hamburg, Germany
2005 Prize for Young Italian Art 2004-2005, Four works for the MAXXI,
51° Biennale di Venezia, Italy (prize winner)
2004 Scholarship for Young Italian of the Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy
2002/2003 Scholarship: Studio Programm, PS1, New York, USA
2001 Prize Querini Stampalia – Young Italian Artist, Venezia, Italy (prize winner)