52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, collateral events
Jan Fabre. Anthropology of a planet
9 JUNE-23 SEPTEMBER 2007
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio
Opening: FRIDAY 8 JUNE 2007
from 7 pm to 10 pm
From 9 June to 23 September 2007 GAMeC is moving to Venice organizing the extraordinary solo exhibition Jan Fabre. Anthropology of a planet, set up in the rooms at the historic residence of Palazzo Benzon overlooking the Grand Canal, part of collateral events at 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. It presents the multifaceted research of the Flemish artist, ranging from sculpture to films, drawings and installations. The exhibition is curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, who also curated the 2003 Fabre solo show of films and drawings, Gaude Succurrere Vitae, at GAMeC in Bergamo and oversaw the publication of the monograph Homo Faber, with a complete collection of the artists works from 1978 to 2006, published for the exhibition held in Antwerp in 2006.
The exhibition is displayed along the entrance hall and the rooms of Palazzo Benzon, offering several large installations; a lot of drawings and many small and medium-sized sculptures.
Since the late Seventies, Jan Fabre one of the most fascinating artists in Belgium and on the international scene has used a broad range of expressive languages from the plastic arts to film, theatre, choreography, dance, drawing and sculpture.
Fabre passes deftly from one discipline to another to obtain in each of them an extraordinarily high level of tension, pointing to the quality as well as the theoretical and formal power of his artistic path. Thus, he goes from being a draughtsman to a creator of images, performer, actor, director and set designer, and thus ultimately an artist in the broadest and most ancestral meaning of the word.
In each of these multiple areas of expression, 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 the subjects that are intrinsic to the Flemish tradition: madness, illness, death, the sweetness of sin, regeneration and spiritual power.
The human being, mans precariousness and frailty are central to Fabres oeuvre, exalting the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth. He considers death the essence of living, the space of what is no longer alive and to which art restores life. Fabre often develops this concept of rebirth through the image of insects, in particular the scarab beetle, though not without learned references to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters of Flemish ‘vanitas’. For Fabre the scarab beetle is the paradigm of transformation and regeneration. Therefore, the moments of passage between the visible and invisible, day and night, life and death, immanence and transcendence and the figures that represent and symbolise them are central to his oeuvre. With his work, Fabre explores life in all its expressions and forms.
This solo show offers the public a look at this path and at the catharsis that is part of each living being through the diversity of the forms that the works acquire in the hands of this Flemish artist.
Organization: GAMeC
Collaborations: Angelos BVBA
Coordination in Venice: Ziva Kraus
Production: Guy Pieters
Jan Fabre. Anthropology of a planet
Palazzo Benzon, Calle Benzon
S. Marco 3927
30124 Venice
e-mail: venice@janfabre.be
9 June – 23 September 2007
Hours: Tuesday Sunday: 11 am 6 pm
Monday Closed
Free Entrance
Press Conferences:
Friday 8 June 2007
at 11 am (Palazzo Benzon)
at 6.15 pm (Teatro Piccolo Arsenale)
GAMeC
Via S. Tomaso, 53 – 24121 Bergamo
tel. 39 035 270272 – fax 39 035 236962
Press Office
CLP Relazioni Pubbliche
tel. 39 02 433403
e-mail: info@clponline.it
