SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA. Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Lara Favaretto, featuring works spanning Turin, Italy-based artist Lara Favaretto’s more than twenty-year career, and presented in collaboration with Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada. The exhibition marks Favaretto’s solo U.S. West Coast institutional debut.
Lara Favaretto is also the Museum’s first exhibit fully conceived under the direction of Abaseh Mirvali, MCASB’s recently appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator. “It was important that I begin my tenure at MCASB by providing a platform for an artist whose work while conceptually impeccable, so poignantly examines the human condition,” said Mirvali. “I wanted to honor what moved me and share her work with the community here.”
The partnership between MCASB and Rennie Collection in the exhibition’s execution is a reflection of the collaborative and socially conscious curatorial practice that Mirvali has brought to MCASB after a well-established career in the global arts circuit. “I have been following Rennie Collection for many years now since we share a similar artistic philosophy as well as social responsibility,” said Mirvali. “My wish to start new collaborations between MCASB and international contemporary art institutions, led me to partner with them on Lara Favaretto.”
Favaretto could be regarded as the continuation of a series of twentieth-century artists whose major concern was questioning the meaning of art, sometimes through play and dark humor. “Notwithstanding, as she has stated several times, the artist is not particularly interested in interrogating contemporary art, but rather, in evoking a deep sense of the human condition,” said Mirvali. “Thus, her artistic production—however colored by notes of Abstract Art, Arte Povera, Kinetic Art, Land Art, or Minimal Art—is composed of aspects that in addition to questioning the intellectual status of a piece of art, are also interrelated to our humaneness. Her work is ephemeral, transient, spontaneous, unpredictable, changing, and even vulnerable, like us.”
Throughout Favaretto’s work, the artist incorporates found materials. Trash may be recycled, while lost and discarded items are re-purposed. Her installations and sculptures often show the artist’s interest for the past, the forgotten, the disregarded. Yet, Favaretto’s overall oeuvre also questions why certain objects survive over others, contemplating their legitimacy in relation to the forgotten, while exposing their inevitable destiny: wear, corrosion, erosion, and breakage.
The exhibition will be shown across four different exhibition sites, including MCASB’s main space, a repurposed downtown storefront at 907 State Street, the Museum’s future location at 35 Anacapa Street, and the Glass Box Gallery, located at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “This exhibition will be unlike any other that MCASB has realized in the past,” said Mirvali. “With four venues spread across Santa Barbara, MCASB enters a new phase of strong and substantive cooperation and activation with other institutions in our community.”
The MCASB main space will house Favaretto’s installation Coppie Semplici (Simple Couples), comprised of moving car wash brushes that alternate between high-speed mechanical rotations and stagnation. Removed from their original context, the brushes spin aimlessly as they deteriorate over time. Also on exhibit in the Museum’s main space will be a work from Favaretto’s ongoing series of collected suitcases, Lost & Found. After obtaining a forgotten suitcase—found at state-run auctions of lost and found items from the Italian railway system, flea-markets, and dumps—Favaretto combines the existing contents with new, unknown items, then locks the case and throws the key away, never allowing the contents to be revealed.
On view in a downtown storefront located at 907 State Street will be Tutti giù per terra (We All Fall Down), one installation of a number of works by Favaretto that follow a consistent form: sealed rooms within rooms containing industrial fans that flush tons (literally) of confetti around the space progressively. Through its materiality—or lack of it—, this piece embraces a plethora of dichotomies which speak to our human condition and exemplify our binary nature: perpetuity/impermanence, noise/silence, creation/destruction, growth/decay.
From February 12 to February 21, 2019, two concrete works from Rennie Collection will be on view at UCSB’s Glass Box Gallery, then on view at the MCASB main space from February 23 to April 28, 2019, opening a dialogue between activity and passivity, movement and stasis, anger and boredom. Fisting and Boring are part of a series in which Favaretto uses her body to imprint a particular action in a block of recently-poured concrete. As intended by the artist, overtime the blocks are subject to wear from exposure to sunlight and air. The title of each work—always a human action—captures the individual state of mind or gesture that has been performed by Favaretto.
In the Santa Barbara Funk Zone district, Favaretto will place a glossy plaque reading “Defense d’Entrer,” or “Do Not Enter,” at the Museum’s future location (35 Anacapa Street) from February 23 to April 28, 2019, forbidding visitors to pass over the plaque. By restricting the entrance to the land, the artist raises questions regarding private property and the need to safeguard an empty lot. MCASB will announce future events to take place at 35 Anacapa Street over the duration of the exhibition.
“Favaretto’s oeuvre reminds us that no matter how hard we try to overcome our temporal nature, no matter how many things we create to transcend, or how many inventions are made to endure, we will always be perishable, organic, oxidable,” Mirvali noted. “Her approach towards our immateriality is so subtle, so beautiful, that the idea of being momentary, like everything else in this life, does not sound frightening, it is just natural.”
Lara Favaretto is curated by Abaseh Mirvali, Executive Director and Chief Curator. Exhibition text by Constanza Medina, Curatorial Research Associate, and Abaseh Mirvali.
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Exhibition Locations and Viewing Periods:
Coppie Semplici (Simple Couples) | Lost & Found
On view February 12 – April 28, 2019 | MCASB
653 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Defense d’Entrer (Do Not Enter)
On view February 12 – February 21, 2019 | MCASB
653 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
On view February 23 – April 28, 2019 | MCASB Funk Zone Lot
35 Anacapa Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Tutti giù per terra (We all fall down)
On view February 12 – April 28, 2019 | Downtown Storefront
907 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Fisting | Boring
On view February 12 – 21, 2019 | Glass Box Gallery | University of California, Santa Barbara
552 University Road, Isla Vista, CA 93117
On view February 23 – April 28, 2019 | MCASB
653 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
About the Artist
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 work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz, Germany (2018); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2017); Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada (2015); MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2012); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2012); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy (2005); and the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bergamo, Italy (2002). Group exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2018); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2017); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (2005); and the Venetian Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale, Italy (2005).
About the Curator
Abaseh Mirvali is the Executive Director, Chief Curator, and CEO at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara, California, USA. Previously she worked as an internationally-recognized independent contemporary art and architecture curator and project producer with a career-long commitment to civic engagement and public service through innovative collaborations between contemporary art initiatives and the community at large. In 2018, Mirvali curated the show of Dubai-based Iranian artists Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, presented at the 13,000-square-foot Officine Nord at the OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin, Italy, and co-edited the publication of the exhibition, with Corraini Edizioni.
Mirvali is the author of the concept and program development of the 2013 edition of The Biennial of the Americas, where she served as CEO, Executive Director and Comisaria from 2011 to 2013. She was the Chief Curator of Draft Urbanism, an innovative and groundbreaking exhibition of urban architectural interventions. Between 2005 and 2009, Mirvali was the Executive Director of the Colección/Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, where she consolidated and developed one of the most distinguished collections of contemporary art for a private institution in Latin America.
Acknowledgements
Support for Lara Favaretto provided by the Alexander Family, Elisabeth & Greg Fowler, John Green, Hayes Commercial Group, Montecito Bank & Trust, Mr. Electric of Oxnard, Paseo Nuevo Shops & Restaurants, Presqu’ile Winery, MCASB Board of Trustees, and MCASB Visionaries.
Special thanks to Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; UCSB Art Department and Glass Box Gallery, Isla Vista, USA; and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy.
