Lara Favaretto (b. Italy 1973) creates works that generate the feeling of enjoyable absurdity laced with mystery, dark undertones, or a sense of premeditated failure. Her sculpture, photography, film, performance, and installation operate between playful and paradoxical and often invite direct participation or collaboration with an audience. Her site-specific piece at the Frieze Art Fair, Project for Some Hallucinations (2007), embodied the spectacle and hype that come with such an event by inviting Her Majesty the Queen of England to attend. The artist pinned the letter of regret from the Queen’s office to one of the trees that were encased inside the tent. A recorded sound track of applause burst out near the close of each day. The Suitcase Project (1997) was a work Favaretto began when she became aware of a state-run company that organized auctions for unclaimed “lost and found” items from the Italian railway system. In 2005, Favaretto installed a single slightly-battered suitcase in a gallery; contents unknown. This installation evoked a sense of traveling, abandonment, and played with our paranoia around unattended baggage in public spaces.

Recently Favaretto has been developing a series of temporary installations titled Momentary Monuments that are based on the idea of destruction and disappearance. In Trento, Italy the artist built a wall consisting of 36000 sandbags piled around the statue of Dante Alighieri which after some time collapsed onto itself. For her project at the 2009 Venice Biennale, she created a temporary swamp in the garden outside of the Arsenale. The swamp was inspired by people who had withdrawn themselves from the public eye in order to protect their inventions, dreams, or their madness and contained submerged objects.

Lara Favaretto has had solo exhibitions at Klosterfelde, Berlin, Galleria Franco Noero, Torino, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino, and Tramway, Glasgow, as well as a special commission for the 2007 Frieze Art Fair, London. Her work has also been shown as part of Making Worlds / Fare Mondi, 53rd Venice Biennial, Italy; Provisions For The Future, 9th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah; 50 Moons of Saturn, T2-2nd Torino Triennial at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Italy; Revolution-Forms That Turn, 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Australia, and Cinq Milliards d’Années/Une seconde une année at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Restless Empathy, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen USA; and The Traveling Show, Fundacion/Coleccion Jumex, Mexico D.F. She has been awarded the Prize for Young Italian Art 2004-2005 at MAXXI, Rome in 2005 and the Premio Furla per l'Arte in 2001. Favaretto studied at Academia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como. Lara Favaretto lives in Torino, Italy.

Lara Favaretto came to the Gardner Museum in January of 2008 and spent time looking through materials in the archives and learning about the people and culture of Boston. She also took the opportunity to spend the month studying and honing her English. Favaretto returned a year later to explore the possibility and logistics of filming the demolition of Mrs. Gardner’s carriage house as a further examination for her series of “Momentary Monuments”. In June of 2009, Favaretto and a crew of filmmakers, security specialists, and a sound technician, filmed the demolition from several vantage points including inside the building, from the arm of the backhoe, and from angles around the site.