Luciano Fabro

All our senses are set in movement, our whole body reacts when we are interested in something, when we come into contact with something or someone else ...  (L. Fabro, 1992)

Born at Turin on November 20, 1936, but Friulan by origin, Fabro began painting in 1957, developing towards Art Informel after the 1958 Venice Biennale, which presented a retrospective devoted to Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko and Otto Wolfgang Schultz Wols. In 1959 he moved to Milan, where he became interested in the research into the space on the other side of the canvas then being conducted by Lucio Fontana.
Starting from the Dada readymade and the presentation of the object as formulated by the American artist Jasper Johns in Three Flags (1958), in 1961-62 Fabro developed his own personal conception of the artwork as a physical object participating in a space which is no longer pictorial but concrete and real. In a first series of works produced between 1963 and 1967, he investigated apparently simple and banal phenomena, such as the behavior of an object in space, revealing the randomness that governs events in nature. In 1963 he issued the text-manifesto La mia certezza: il mio senso per la mia azione (pseudo-Bacone), in which he formulated the artist’s relationship with the world, Fabro backed up his research with a coherent theoretical activity. His interest was focused on the perception of the environment in the relationship between external and internal reality, the idea of the work of art as a necessary instrument for interpreting experience and developing new planes of knowledge. He had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Vismara in Milan in 1965, exhibiting works in glass and metal tubing. Then in 1967 the critic Germano Celant invited him to take part in the exhibition Lo Spazio dell’Immagine in Foligno. This represented a new strand in Italian art which, in harmony with Minimalism, acquired an architectural dimension and sought to incorporate space. Im-Spazio [a compound of Image and Space] was the term Celant coined to define this development in which the image was assimilated to real space. This line of research was soon left behind and absorbed into Arte Povera, theorized by Celant as a reduction of the work to physical reality itself, abolishing the boundaries between art and life. The series of Tautologie (1967-68), in which the titles of the individual works denoted the object they presented, formed part of Fabro’s development in the ranks of the new art movement. In subsequent cycles, from Italie (“Italies”, 1968) to Piedi (“Feet”, 1971), Arcobaleni (“Rainbows”, 1976) and Attaccapanni (“Clothes Hangers”, 1977), Fabro reversed the generally accepted symbolic function of known forms with their silhouettes, realized in a variety of materials, being set in space in unusual and bewildering ways. The intent is to induce in the viewer a conscious experience of space conducted with all his senses and without preconceptions. Fabro uses monumental dimensions in his works, with a sumptuous conception and handcrafted quality of a kind reminiscent of the finest Italian tradition (Piedi); he adopts refined materials such as marble, glass and silk, and above all uses color and light, as exemplied in the series of Attaccapanni exhibited at the Galleria Framart in Naples (1977). In 1978, together with Hidetoshi Nagasawa and Jole de Sanna, he began to teach and explore art theory at the Casa degli Artisti in Milan, an experience which produced the volume Regole d’arte (Milan 1980) and the decision to undertake an academic career. Some of the numerous anthological exhibitions he was commissioned to install in the principal European museums from 1980 on were conceived as large Habitats. The first of them was produced for the exhibition curated by Celant in 1980 at the PAC in Milan. In the Habitats the environmental dimension acquired fundamental importance. They were at the center of the “ideal city” and were the most extreme point of Fabro’s research into space as a field of action, woven out of relationships and the necessary interactions between the various elements presented. He taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara and then, in 1983, won a chair at the Accademia di Brera.
If the Gioielli series recalls the great names of Eastern and Western culture (1981) and the German Romantic tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1984), in 1984 the titles of various works began to contain references to figures from Greek history and mythology (Euclides, 1984; Ephesus, Prometeo, 1986). At the same time he began his cycle Esprit de géometrie, esprit de finesse. Fabro embarked on a reflection on the history of ancient and recent art which at the end of the eighties led him to produce works such as Paolo Uccello 1450-1989 (1989), in which he undermined classical perspective, and Due nudi che scendono le scale ballando il Boogie-Woogie (“Two Nudes Descending the Staircase Dancing the Boogie-Woogie”, 1989), which brings together the fathers of modern figurative culture, Duchamp and Mondrian. In the nineties he produced public works, in which he dealt with problems inherent in the social and professional role of the artist, urban design and community consensus (Contratto sociale, 1992, façade of the Town Hall of Breda in Holland). In dealing with the iconography of the city, he often used nature as a linguistic and material instrument (Giardino all’Italiana, 1994, Basel), and reflected on the representation of nature in itself (Nido, 1994 nature reserve of Rost, Norway), and on religious imagery (Izanami, Izannagi, Amaterasu, 1999, Japan) and funerary themes (Tumulus, 1999, Nordhorf, Germany). In 1981 he received the Ludwig Award for work and theory; in 1994 he was elected an Honorary Academician of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. His writings, translated into various languages, include Letture parallele (1973–75), Attaccapanni (1978), Vademecum (1980–96), Lettera ai Germani (1983), Arte torna Arte (1999). He exhibited a number of times at the Venice Biennale (1972, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1993) and the Kassel Documenta (1972, 1982, 1992), as well as the 12th Biennial of Sao Paulo in Brazil (1975), the Paris Biennial 1971), the Milan Triennale (1985), the 11th and 14th Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome (1986, 2005). The numerous monographic exhibitions devoted to his work by the major cultural foundations include those presented by the Castello di Rivoli in Turin (1989), the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples (1989), the Fundaciò Juan Mirò in Barcelona (1990), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1992), the Middelheim of Antwerp (1994), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1996) and the Tate Gallery in London (1997). On the invitation of Eduardo Cicelyn, in 2004 he produced the installation L’Italia all’asta in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, which presented in spectacular fashion one of the principal themes of his artistic achievement. Among his public art projects he published Invito a: Luciano Fabro, Sol LeWitt, Eliseo Mattiacci, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, conceived by Claudio Parmiggiani and sponsored by the City of Reggio Emilia, and in 2005 he exhibited Araba Fenice. the following year, as part of the encounters Perché non parli? Conversazioni d'arte held at the Spazio Oberdan in Milan, he and Daniel Soutif discussed the subject of sculpture.
He died on June 22, 2007 at his home in Milan.