The exhibition is the first museum retrospective dedicated to Luciano Fabro in Italy since his death in 2007. It brings together around fifty of the artist’s most significant sculptures and installations.
‘Luciano Fabro: Inhabiting Space’ examines Fabro’s conceptual and formal approach to space, exploring the ways it engages with the perception of those who inhabit it. The presentation places emphasis on his investigations into perception and spatial experience, initiated in the 1960s, tracing their development from his early experiments with mirroring surfaces through the following fifty years.
It follows the evolution of increasingly complex architectural structures and spaces, often made of paper, which Fabro referred to as ‘habitats’: ideal environments, either autonomous and self-contained or integrated into existing spaces, conceived to house and activate his works. The notion of the habitat runs throughout Fabro’s practice from the 1960s onwards, although he began using the term in the 1980s.
A central figure in postwar Italian art, Fabro was a leading member of the Arte Povera movement while maintaining an independent and nonconformist approach to artistic research. Having moved to Milan in 1959 after spending his childhood in Friuli, he found the city’s vibrant cultural scene a fertile environment for the development of his artistic practice. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fabro founded Casa degli Artisti with artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa and critic Jole De Sanna as a center intended to foster dialogue and experimentation among generations of younger artists.
The exhibition is curated by Fiammetta Griccioli, Roberta Tenconi and Vicente Todolí, with the collaboration of Silvia Fabro of Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro.
