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Jan Fabre was born in 1958 in Antwerp, Belgium, where he lives and works. An internationally acclaimed theatre-maker and choreographer, over the last twenty years he has developed a body of work using a variety of materials. These include blood, bic ink and beetle elytra.
Jan Fabre studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Institute of Decorative Arts and Crafts in Antwerp. At the end of the 70s, Jan Fabre presented provocative “actions” and “private performances”.
He created works combining dance and theatre, whose radicalism regularly provoked controversy, such as “Je suis sang” (2000).
A great draughtsman, Jan Fabre creates sculptures and installations that explore the question of metamorphosis, the dialogue between art and science, the relationship between man and nature, and the artist as warrior of beauty.
Jan Fabre’s work is surprising: we can unexpectedly observe the beauty of beetle corpses. For Heaven of Delight (2002), no fewer than 1.6 million beetles were used as raw material. In doing so, he decoupled ethics and aesthetics. In 2012, echoing Salvador Dali’s photograph Dali Atomicus (1948), he created a performance in which cats were thrown down a staircase (one metre high). The event provoked violent reactions.
