Luciano Fabro (1936)
Italy

"Born in 1936 in Turin (Italy) – died in 2007 in Milan (Italy)

Luciano Fabro is one of the major figures of Arte Povera, an Italian avant-garde movement whose term first appeared in 1967 with the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio conceived by the art critic Germano Celant in Genoa. It then brought together artists – such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali and Emilio Prini – around a common project: the creation of immediately intelligible works thanks to the “empirical and non-speculative character of the material”. Although he began his artistic work as a painter in 1957, Luciano Fabro experimented with many materials and modes of expression (sculptures, environments, theoretical or manifesto texts, etc.). His works have been presented at prestigious international events (Venice Biennale in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1986 and 1993, Cassel documenta in 1972, 1982 and 1992 and the 12th São Paulo Biennale in 1975). Numerous personal exhibitions were also organized (at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 1989, at the Fundaciò Juan Mirò in Barcelona in 1990, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992 and at the Tate Gallery in London in 1997).

Luciano Fabro discovered the spatialist movement of Lucio Fontana in 1958 at the Venice Biennale: the works articulated around the notions of time and space will convince him to get off the canvas and become interested in the creation of physical objects, which participate in a real and concrete space. In 1963, he wrote his manifesto, La mia certezza: il moi senso per la mia azione (pseudo-Bacone) [My certainty: my feeling for my action (pseudo-Bacon)], in which he expressed his interest in the modes of perception, the relationships between an external reality and an interior reality and the idea that works of art constitute means of progressive knowledge of the world. Finally he affirms that “one of the attitudes of the artist is to experience the present as the past. There is therefore not a memory of the past, but a memory which creates the present. The work is a sort of alloy of all time”.

During the 1970s, Luciano Fabro also focused on using a very wide variety of materials, whether raw or precious, from which he created unusual affinities. Thus, gold and bread dough, marble and pressed wood, can be combined in the same work. He establishes power relations, paradoxes, tensions and balance within his assemblages and in their presentation which will solicit a conscious and heightened experience of space in the viewer. For him it is also about “creating a language that allows communication to be established between men and nature” by attenuating, for example, “the hardness of the sculptures with something living”.
In the 1980s, the titles chosen by Fabro for his works increasingly evoke mythology, religions or history. He can also offer interpretations of famous works (Paolo Uccello 1450-1989, 1989) or focus on illustrating the events of his time (Prometeo, 1986-1987 in reference to the Chernobyl disaster). This interest in current events announces his pieces from the 1990s in the public space, focused on what he considers to be the necessity of the social role of the artist, while taking care, as always, to create works that allow a revelation of reality."

(Source, website, Contemporary Art Institute of Villeurbanne)

Work :

• Quid nihil nisiminus? (1970)