Italian artist Lara Favaretto (b. 1973, Treviso, Italy) provokes and engages her audiences with work that is both playful and celebratory while paradoxically evoking the inevitability of failure and decay.
She is a graduate of Kingston University, London, UK (1997) and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, Italy (1999). As part of an advanced course in Visual Art at the latter, she spent 1998 as Hamilton FultonVisiting Professor at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy. In 2008 she was artist-in-residence at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, Boston, USA, the Hayward Gallery, London, UK, and the Proa Foundation in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has received numerous awards including the Querini Stampalia Prize for Young Italian Artists (2001), a scholarship for Studio Program, MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2002 – 2003) and a scholarship for the Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy (2004). In 2005 she won the Venice Biennale Young Italian Art Prize. Favaretto currently lives in Turin, Italy.
Favaretto has worked with a range of media throughout her career including performance, sculpture, installation and video. She has exhibited her work widely in solo exhibitions including, Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out, MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2012), Absolutely no Donations, Tramway, Glasgow,Scotland (2009), and The Poor are Mad, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Italy (2005). She has participated in group presentations such as, When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA (2012), Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), The Residue of Memory, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA (2012), Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2011), Hey, We’re Closed!, Hayward Gallery, London (2010), The Traveling Show, Fondación /Colección Jumex, Mexico (2010), SI Sindrome Italiana, Le Magasin - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2010), Venice Biennale, Italy (2009), Civica 1989 – 2009 Celebration, Institution, Critique, Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento, Italy (2009), Sharjah Biennial 9, UAE (2009), Revolutions - Forms That Turn, Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2008), Où? - Scènes du Sud: Espagne, Italie, Portugal, Carré d’Art de Nîmes, France ( 2007), Une seconde, Une Année, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006), Globos Sonda / Trial Balloons, MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Spain (2006), Ecstasy: Recent Experiments in Altered Perception, MOCA – The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (2005).