Paula Cooper Gallery is delighted to announce an expansive exhibition of works by Luciano Fabro across both New York galleries. This will be the gallery’s first one-person exhibition of Fabro’s work since announcing the representation of the artist in collaboration with the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro in 2021. It will also be the first exhibition of Fabro’s work in the US in eight years.
Known for his poetic, visual sensibility and intuitive forms, Fabro (1936–2007) was a central figure in the movement to redefine sculpture in post-war Italy. Closely associated with Arte Povera and included in the group’s first exhibition in Genoa in 1967, Fabro described himself as the ‘heretic’ of the movement—a position which granted him a broad, collective sense of culture that extended beyond a single nation or time period to embrace nature, mythology, and antiquity. Like his fellow poveristi, Fabro’s hybrid practices and radical tautology of materials prompted apt comparisons with the anti-form tendencies of conceptual and process-oriented art. And while many of Fabro’s works align with the dematerializing sentiment that was in the air in the 1960s and 1970s, he is distinguished by the unapologetic sensuality of his sculptures, richly endowed with traditions of the classical past. The late Germano Celant, a long-time champion of Fabro’s work, elegantly summarized this contradiction: “[Fabro] was willing to churn the avant-garde waters with his outright indulgence in Baroque pleasures.”[1]
Works from Fabro’s Computer series (1988–1996) will occupy the large gallery at 534 West 21st street. Fabricated from sections of metal framing and colored metal rods, these subtly elegant sculptural reliefs “seem to fly through the air,” in the artist’s words.[2] The exhibition will also include sculptures from Fabro’s celebrated Piedi (feet) series (1968-2000) shown alongside the delicate and inconspicuous wall installation, Penelope (1972), a pairing that was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972. Fabro’s major work L’Infinito (1989) will occupy the gallery at 521 West 21st Street. An industrial steel cable is placed directly on the floor and twisted to form the mathematical symbol of infinity, and its arches and central axis are grounded by eight pieces of Calacatta marble. “The idea of infinity is not everything [...],” Fabro said of this work, “There is more. There is something that goes beyond infinity.”[3] The fifty-four ceramic tiles that encompass Fabro’s Ceramiche (1981) will be hung on the surrounding walls. This will be the first time that L’Infinito and Ceramiche have been shown together since Fabro’s critically-acclaimed one-person exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1996.
Luciano Fabro (born in Turin, Italy in 1936) lived and worked in Milan until his death in 2007. Fabro was a prolific writer, publishing multiple texts on art theory. During his lifetime, Fabro’s work was the subject of numerous important one-person exhibitions including at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1981-82, the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1987, the Fundació Miró, Barcelona in 1990, the Kunstmuseum Luzern in 1990-1991, SFMOMA in 1992, the Centre Pompidou in 1996-97, the Tate Gallery in 1997, and the Musée Bourdelle, Paris in 2004. Between 1972 and 1997, Fabro participated in eight editions of the Venice Biennale as well as three editions of documenta in Kassel. In 2014 the first major, posthumous retrospective of his work was held at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Fabro was the recipient of awards including the Sikkens Prize, awarded from Rotterdam (1987), the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize from Rome (1993); and a Coutts Contemporary Art Award from Zurich (1994).
[1] Germano Celant, “Luciano Fabro: The Image That Isn’t There,” Artforum vol. 27, no. 2, October 1988, p. 108
[2] Luciano Fabro with Martin Schwander in Luciano Fabro, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunstmuseum Lucerne & Wiese Verlag, 1991), p. 203
[3] Luciano Fabro in “The Art Returns to the Art,” interview with Jan Braet, in Knack, Brussels, June 1989, pp. 163-166
