Lara Favaretto: Absolutely Nothing

This summer, Nottingham Contemporary presents a major solo exhibition by Lara Favaretto.

Favaretto’s exhibition, her largest to date in the UK, will bring together pivotal pieces spanning two decades of her practice, along with recent works and a major public commission. The Italian artist’s work addresses sculpture’s mutability and monumentality, often testing its relationship to time; failure, futility and disappearance become generative processes. As Favaretto has said, “I like to shift from perfection to the fall, to push the work to its tipping point, its limit, to endanger it, to the point of making it yield, jam, collapse.”

The exhibition aims to explore a state of uncertainty, where art works become like the remains of events. On display will be 14 enigmatic sculptures titled Bulk (2002), plaster casts of papier-maché carnival masks that were once part of a procession led by Favaretto with young people in Italy. All that remains are the traces of the event. Another work, Relic (2015), a series of nine concrete sculptures, akin to archeological finds, that were cast from the fourth episode in Favaretto’s "Momentary Monument" series, 400 tonnes of collected scrap metal that were presented at dOCUMENTA (13). Only the concrete parts of the installation were kept, like remnants from an unknown past.

Elsewhere in the exhibition will be an eight-metre triptych. Titled 7724-7716 (2016), this is the largest “wool painting” Favaretto has made since she began the series in 2010.  Each of these works is made with a single thread of salvaged wool tightly wrapped around a found painting, which becomes almost completely obscured. Another piece, Di Blasi R7 (2012), takes its title from a moped, which will be ridden repeatedly around the galleries before the exhibition opens. All of the gallery walls will be randomly scraped, marked and dented by this “private performance”.