Artists

Over the past 30 years, Jan Fabre (1958) has produced works as a visual artist, theatre maker and author. In the late 1970s, he caused a sensation as a performance artist. In 1982, Fabre’s work “This is theatre like it was to be expected and foreseen” and two years later “The power of theatrical madness” challenged the foundations of the European theatre establishment. Productions such as “Da un’altra Faccia del Tempo”, “Je suis Sang”, “Angel of Death”, “Quando l’uomo principale è una donna”, “Orgy of Tolerance”, “Preparatio Mortis” and “Prometheus-Landscape II” have earned Fabre international acclaim. In 2005, Jan Fabre was artiste associé of the Festival d’Avignon, where he created “Histoire des Larmes” for the Cour d’Honneur. In 2007, Jan Fabre created “Requiem für eine Metamorphose” for the Felsenreitschule of Salzburg. As an author he wrote numerous theater texts, such as “We need heroes now”, “Another sleepy dusty delta day”, “I am a mistake”, “A tribe that’s me”, “The king of plagiarism” and “Etant donnés”, to name but a few. For “Mount Olympus” he wrote several texts on sleeping and dreaming: “Remnants”.

Over the years, Jan Fabre has also built up an exceptional oeuvre as a visual artist. He has become well known to a wide audience with the “Tivoli castle” (1990), “Heaven of Delight” (2002), in which the ceiling of the Mirror Room at the Royal Palace in Brussels is drawn with jewel beetle wing-shields, his open-air sculptures, including “The man who measures the clouds” (1998), “Searching for Utopia” (2003) and “Totem” (2000–2004). Among recent exhibitions are “Homo Faber” (KMSKA, Antwerp, 2006), “Hortus / Corpus” (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, 2011), “From the Cellar to the Attic – From the Feet to the Brain” (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2008 and Venice Biennale, 2009), “The Hour Blue” (Kunsthistorisches Museum,Vienna, 2011) and “Stigmata. Actions and Performances 1976–2013” (MAXXI, Rome, 2013 and M HKA, Antwerp, 2015). In 2008, he presented his work at the Louvre, Paris (“L’Ange de la metamorphose”). In 2016, he will create a large scale exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum in St-Petersburg.