Jan Fabre

With a career spanning some forty years, Jan Fabre (b. 1958, Antwerp) is regarded as one of the most innovative figures on the international contemporary art scene. As a visual artist, theatre artist and author he creates an intensely personal atmosphere with its own rules, laws, characters, symbols and motifs. Curious by nature, and influenced by research carried out by the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), Jan Fabre became fascinated by the world of insects and other creatures at a very young age.

In the late 1970s, while studying at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he began exploring ways of incorporating the human body into his research. His own performances and actions, from 1976 to the present, have been essential to his artistic journey. Jan Fabre’s visual language exists within an idiosyncratic world, one that is populated by bodies that define natural existence through a permanent balancing act on the thin line between life and death. Metamorphosis and the constant interaction between animal-human and human-animal are key concepts in Fabre’s visual canon. His spiritual and physical universe unfolds within his literary texts, his nocturnal notes or so-called ‘Night Diaries’.

As a consilience artist, Jan Fabre has merged performance art and theatre. He has changed the idiom of theatre by bringing real time and real action to the stage. After his historic eight-hour production “This is theatre like it was to be expected and foreseen” (1982) and four-hour production “The power of theatrical madness” (1984), he raised his work to a new level in the exceptional and monumental “Mount Olympus. To glorify the cult of tragedy, a 24-hour performance” (2015).

Jan Fabre enjoys worldwide recognition thanks to such works as ‘The Man Who Measures the Clouds’ (1998), which can be seen at various sites (SMAK, Ghent; deSingel, Antwerp; Brussels Airport; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa), the ‘Tivoli’ castle in Mechelen (1990) and permanent public works in prominent locations, including ‘Heaven of Delight’ (2002) at the Royal Palace in Brussels, ‘The Gaze Within (The Hour Blue)’ (2011-2013) in the royal staircase at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the installation of ‘The Man Who Bears the Cross’ (2015) in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp and, in the same city, the three altarpieces after Rubens, Jordaens and Van Dyck in St. Augustine’s Church/AMUZ. Like ‘Heaven of Delight’, these altarpieces are made with the wing cases of jewel beetles. Jan Fabre paints with light by replacing traditional oil paint with one of the most durable of all natural materials.

Key solo exhibitions by this versatile Belgian artist include ‘Homo Faber’ (KMSKA, Antwerp, 2006), ‘Hortus / Corpus’ (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, 2011) and ‘Stigmata. Actions and Performances’, 1976–2013 (MAXXI, Rome, 2013; M HKA, Antwerp, 2015; MAC, Lyon, 2016; Leopold Museum, Vienna, 2017; CAAC, Sevilla, 2018). Jan Fabre was the first living artist to present a large-scale exhibition at the Louvre, Paris (‘L’ange de la métamorphose’, 2008). His well-known ensemble ‘The Hour Blue’ (1977-1992) travelled to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (2011), the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne (2012) and the Busan Museum of Art (2013), amongst other museums.