Jan Fabre. Hortus/Corpus

From 10 April 2011, a major exhibition on and with Belgian artist Jan Fabre (Antwerp 1958) is on display in the Kröller-Müller Museum. The title, which consists of the simple words, garden (hortus) and body (corpus), derives from the universe of Jan Fabre. The insect, the human, the angel and the blue of the perpetually recurring moment at which night becomes day and life awakens, play an important role therein. They are the four basic elements with which Fabre composes and reveals to us, in ever-altering arrays, his thoughts on life and death, beauty and disgust, vulnerability and violence, mortality and eternity. The exhibition will run until 4 September 2011.

With his sculptures, films and drawings in the exhibition spaces and corridors and with five installations in the sculpture garden, Jan Fabre briefly makes the Kröller-Müller Museum his own personal domain. The emphasis here is on the human body; on the physical and the capacity for depleting and recharging energies. The man who measures the clouds (1998) is the first sculpture by Fabre that visitors to the exhibition encounter, while walking on the path through the front garden of the museum towards the entrance. On the right, a human figure stands on a small stepladder, perched on the edge of the museum’s roof. The man measures the clouds with a ruler. For Fabre, he symbolizes that which an artist does: balancing on the border between the possible and impossible.

Jan Fabre is internationally renowned as one of today’s most original and versatile artists. He has been making his name as a groundbreaking performance artist for over 25 years already. This basis provides the source for his plays and operas on the one hand, and his sculptural work on the other. The Kröller-Müller Museum is hosting Jan Fabre as a visual artist.

Jan Fabre
Hortus/Corpus