Vanya
Horwath

Vanya Horwath was born 1992 in Phoenix, Arizona. She acquired her BA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London, UK. She was was the Inaugural recipient of the Franklyn Liegel Award for Excellence in Painting; Los Angeles, California (2013), and was a finalist for the Chadwell Award; London, UK (2018). Horwath has shown in Los Angeles, London and Istanbul. She now lives and works in London.

My work explores the potential of painting materials through the invention and intervention of process. Design may initiate a painting, but the path taken remains flexible. This allows for the material to influence the making. Neither component takes precedence over the other. I manipulate, train and follow the materials to create the effect that I want while embracing their fluid nature and letting them behave naturally. Experimentation occurs on site through the making of the work, increasing the possibilities of chance accidents and slips in a process. These happy accidents introduce new potentials for the course of the painting’s making and propose unexpected complications to navigate.

The paintings begin with an idea – perhaps a cultural quotation expressed in colour or form – but the unpredictable behaviour of my materials is a catalyst for how the painting evolves as it diverges from an initial design. Drips, smears, glitches, cracks unapologetically permeate the surfaces of the paintings and expose the negotiation between my control and an insistent materiality. There is a dialogue between maker and material: I make a move, the material responds and the artist reacts. This call and response cycle is what realises the final image of the painting. Alongside process, the paintings amalgamate colour relationships, signs, symbols culled from material and visual cultures and varied genres while juxtaposing two and three-dimensional renderings to evoke a sense of uncanny familiarity that is difficult to define.