Jan Fabre
Jan Fabre (b. 1958) is a multidisciplinary artist who gained international fame with performances, drawings, sculptures, theatre work, operas and texts. In the late 1970s, he received training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Municipal Institute for Decorative Arts and Crafts in Antwerp. He began drawing and working on performances and installations at a young age. His first solo exhibition was in 1978. In the early 1980s, Fabre was active as a performer in various states in the USA. From the 1980s onward he created theatrical productions, choreographies and operas which he considered total artworks. The body, involved in a cycle of life, death and rebirth, is central to his work. Fabre evokes this with the help of materials such as meat and bones. His drawings also use his own blood, tears or sperm. He furthermore depicts metamorphosis and immortality through his fascination for insects, using the wing cases of masses of beetles to create sculptures with vibrating, shiny surfaces. Finally, he regularly works with ‘Bic’ ballpoint ink, drawing and writing on pieces of cloth, sheets of paper or – with the help of assistants – covering gigantic canvases in ballpoint. In his larger ‘blue’ installations, everything revolves around the so-called ‘blue hour’ – a mysterious time/space between day and night, light and dark, in which everything is in motion. This blue hour also functions as a symbol of metamorphosis and rebirth, or in the words of the artist, ‘When night animals go to sleep and day animals awaken, there is a moment of sublime silence in nature, in which everything splits, bursts open and changes. That is the moment I have searched for and tried to capture. It is a space between day and night, between life and death, in which indefinable things happen.’ [Klaar Leroy]
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