Jan Fabre ^©  

(1958)

Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium;

Private collection, Belgium

Exhibitions:

Jan Fabre / Battlefields & Beekeepers, Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium, 1999, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue published by Deweer Gallery;

Jan Fabre - Homo Faber, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten en M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium, from 13 May to 15 August 2006, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue on pp. 34-35;

Jan Fabre - Hortus / Corpus, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, from 10 April to 4 September 2011;

Certificate of authenticity signed by the artist


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Jan Fabre (Antwerp, 1958) is one of the most innovative and eclectic contemporary artists. Choreographer, director, scenographer, but also author of sculptures, drawings, films, installations and radical performances has produced since the seventies works that have made him famous all over the world, giving form and truth to his obsessions with a sense of discipline and perfection unparalleled. Visual artist, theatrical artist and author, he uses his works to speculate in a noisy and tangible way on life and death, physical and social transformations, as well as on the cruel and intelligent imagination that is present in both animals and humans.

"Battlefield" is the title of a series of works that Jan Fabre realizes in the late nineties and dedicated to insects and their being part of the universal balance of all things and, at the same time, the desire to stage a modern metaphor of war. Often the artist develops the concepts he wants to express through visions related to scarabs, also here very present, which for him are the absolute paradigm of the human being. As the name implies, in Battlefield the Belgian goes to reproduce battlefields: the peculiarity is that instead of soldiers swarming on the ground we see moths and beetles, busy moving mud and in a synchronic march towards the edges of the table. On the table stand the green carapaces of beetles, able to absorb light and that in this situation a little want to remember the armor of medieval knights (as it is written in the presentation of the personal exhibition Jan Fabre - Anthropology of a planet set up at Palazzo Benzon, Venice, in 2007): the battlefield thus becomes that of all humanity, metaphorically represented by small animals.