Jan Fabre

photography Stefan Van Fleteren

Jan Fabre, visual artist, theatre director and writer was born in Antwerp in 1958. A remarkable element in Jan Fabre’s work, which has become more evident since widespread recognition enabled the artist to create the circumstances for it, is Fabre’s constant cross-over between theatre and visual arts, between different genres within both, and between the visual arts of old and modern traditions and his own work.

Furthermore, as Giacinto di Pietrantonio puts it: ‘Jan Fabre has always used a broad range of expressive languages, from the plastic arts to film, theatre, choreography, dance, drawing and sculpture. In each of these areas, Fabre focuses his research on the body, understood as a physical reality and mental dimension. His art reflects human nature – necessarily fragile and mortal – and the desire each of us has to overcome this precariousness, through subjects that are intrinsic to the Flemish tradition: madness, illness, death, the sweetness of sin, regeneration and spiritual power.’

As with for example Battlefields and Beekeepers, Umbraculum, A Meeting - Vstrecha (with Ilya Kabakov) and more recently Turtles and Landscapes, Deweer Art Gallery has always attempted to document every major thematical step in the development of Fabre’s work, often while also showing less known aspects or unknown works.

As the next investigation into the poetical possibilities of the body, a leading thread within his oeuvre, Fabre recently continued to explore the theme of the brains through drawings, models, and videoworks. At the occasion of his soloshow From the Cellar to the Attic / From the Feet to the Brain at Kunsthaus Bregenz, director Eckhard Schneider described what Fabre’s work essentially stands for:

‘Applying artistic strategies which he devised in the early part of his career and continued to develop in different disciplines, Fabre unfolds a universe of plentitude based on five principles: the awareness of the power of the images of the real resulting in visually overwhelming sculptural tableaus; the extreme emphasis of the body as the interface between life and death, gony and fulfillment; the fascination for insects as a symbol of metamorphosis, as the subject of intense research, and as an important material for a wide variety of works; the continuous application of the auto-mechanical principle originating from the discovery of the body and the behavior of insects; the fascination for mirroring and doubling providing the point of departure of many works.’

Short Biography

Fabre has taken part in important events such as the Venice Biennial (1984, 1990 and 2003), Documenta in Kassel (1982 and 1992), the Sao Paolo Biennial (1991), the Lyon Biennial (2000), the Valencia Biennial (2001) and the Istanbul Biennial (1992 and 2001). Furthermore he had important solo exhibitions in leading museums throughout the world, a.o. at Kunsthalle Basel, Centro de Arte Moderna Lissabon, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Kunstverein Hannover, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Ludwig Muzeum Budapest, Muhka Antwerp, Haggerty Museum of Art Milwaukee, Museum of Contemporary Art Warshaw, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Smak Ghent, Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, Fundacio Joan Miro Barcelona, Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art Contemporain Nice and Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon.

In 2007 there was the grand-scale Homo Faber event in Antwerp, with important exhibitions a.o. at the Muhka Museum of Contemporary Art and the Royal Museum for Fine Arts. In 2008 the Musée du Louvre in Paris presents “The Angel of Metamorphosis”, a grand scale solo exhibition for which Fabre has 39 halls in the Richelieu wing at his disposal to juxtapose his works to those of the Louvre’s collection.
After having presented six solo-shows by Jan Fabre between 1988 and 2006, the gallery organised his first one-man show after the Louvre, “Is the brain the most sexy part of the body?”, with new works exclusively. The show was followed by a grand scale soloshow at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, where Fabre transformed the building into one giant metaphorical installation, a concept based on his investigations on the human body.