Jan Fabre

JAN FABRE (Antwerp, Belgium, 1958).
Untitled, 1988.
Two sandblasted glass panels and Bic ballpoint pen ink.
Exhibitions:
- Jan Fabre - Hortus / Corpus, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, 2011. - Theaterbeelden, Fort Asperen, Asperen, The Netherlands, 1988.
- Jan Fabre: Modellen 1977-1985, Deweer Art Gallery, Otegem, Belgium, 1988.
Publications:
- Jan Fabre, Hortus/Corpus, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, 2011.
Measurements: 250 x 180 cm (each).

Few artists have been as groundbreaking and innovative, both in the field of contemporary theater and in the visual arts, as the Belgian artist, writer and theater director Jan Fabre. Jan Fabre gained international fame in the field of visual arts in the 1980s with his blue Bic drawings, now collected under the title "Het Uur Blauw" (The Blue Hour), and the related extension of the drawing concept to total spatial installations. The pair of works on tender, absolutely typical of the artist's "blue period", is doubly emblematic for Jan Fabre's oeuvre. On the one hand, it is an expression of his fascination with the Blue Hour, exemplified in a multitude of drawings, objects and installations and in which the artist sublimates the blue Bic ballpoint ink. Here, the front face of both glass panels is finger-painted with ballpoint ink. On the other side, the left panel confronts the viewer with the image of an owl, a recurring symbol in Jan Fabre's art and theater of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The owl is for Fabre an eminent animal of the night, as a silent symbolic representation of wisdom.

The second phase of Jan Fabre's work is characterized by the use of insects as raw material for sculptures. In the most recent decade, the artist focuses on the theme of the human brain through drawings, sculptures and installations. Apart from these important series of visual artworks, the artist has created numerous drawings, conceptual maquettes, sculptures, installations, films, etc.

Jan Fabre is a playwright, stage director, choreographer and visual artist. He studied at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts in Antwerp and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Between 1976 and 1980 he wrote his first texts for the theater. In 1978 he made drawings with his own blood during the solo performance My Body, My Blood, My Landscape. In 1980 he made the "Bic-Art Room", as an opposition to "Big Art"; he locked himself for three days and three nights in a white cube filled with objects, drawing with blue Bic pens. In 1986 he founded Troubleyn/Jan Fabre, a theater company with extensive international projection. He has been a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium since 1998 and is a Commander of the Order of Leopold II. In 2008, The Angel of Metamorphosis was exhibited at the Louvre Museum, an exhibition inaugurated by Queen Paola of Belgium. He decorated the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors of the Royal Palace in Brussels, which he called Heaven of Delights, made of 1600,000 beetle-beetle elytra, which has been widely praised. He also made Totem, a sculpture of a giant insect pierced by a huge twenty-three-meter steel spire, at the Ladeuzeplein in Leuven. The sculpture was erected in 2005 to commemorate the 575th anniversary of the historic Leuven University Library.