Fabr exhibition. Exhibition “Jan Fabre: Knight of Despair – Warrior of Beauty”

The editor-in-chief of our website, Mikhail Statsyuk, shortly before the opening of the exhibition “Knight of Despair - Warrior of Beauty” at the State Hermitage, visited its author Jan Fabre in his creative workshop Troubleyn in Antwerp and discussed what to expect from his opening day in Russia.

The artist’s office and at the same time his workshop with rehearsal rooms settled in the building of a former theater, which stood abandoned after the fire. In front of the entrance you are greeted by a sign “Only art can break your heart. Only kitsch can make you rich." In the hall I stumble over a hatch - the work of Robert Wilson, which seems to connect the Belgian workshop with his theater academy, Watermill Center.

On the second floor, while we are waiting for Ian, for some reason we can smell the smells of a freshly prepared omelette or fried egg - behind the next wall there is a kitchen, the wall of which was painted by Marina Abramovich with pig's blood.

Art is literally everywhere here - even the toilet is indicated by a suspended neon hand that blinks, showing either two fingers or one. This is a work by artist Mix Popes, in which the “V” or Peace gesture refers to the feminine, and the middle finger to the masculine.

When Fabre appears in the hall, lighting a Lucky Strike cigarette, a heart-rending child’s cry is heard from somewhere below: “No, this is not a rehearsal for my new performance,” jokes the artist.

Tell us right away how you persuaded Mikhail Borisovich?

There was no need to persuade! Six or seven years ago, Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky and the head of the Hermitage 20/21 project, Dmitry Ozerkov, saw my exhibition at the Louvre, and, it seems to me, they liked it. After another three years, we met with Mr. Piotrovsky, and he invited me to make an exhibition in the Hermitage. I went to Russia and realized that for this I would need a lot of space. Barbara de Koninck and I ( artistic director of the exhibition - Approx. ed.) we immediately settled on the hall with the Flemings - next to them I look like a gnome born in the land of giants. I grew up next to Rubens' house in Antwerp. At the age of six I tried to copy his paintings. The Hermitage seemed to me to be a repository of the great Flemings who fascinated me. I wanted to build a “dialogue” with the giants of Flanders’ past.

Who are you building a dialogue with?

For the Van Dyck Hall I created a series of marble bas-reliefs “My Queens”. This is a kind of allusion to his ceremonial portraits of important royalty of the time. “My Queens” are patrons and patrons of my work, made of Caribbean marble. But I do it jokingly, because my friends wear clown hats.

A new series of drawings “Carnival” about the celebration of life and fun - exactly like the church rituals to which my Catholic mother introduced me to as a child - a reference to the Hermitage paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Younger. The mixture of paganism with Christianity is an important element related to the traditions of the Belgian school, which is important to me. We are a small country and have always been under someone’s influence or ownership - German, Spanish, French. Such “peculiarities” are part of our personal history.

My “blue” canvases ( we are talking about “Bic-art” - a series of works “Blue Hour”, made with a blue Bic pen - Approx. ed.), which are also presented in the Hermitage, are made in a very special technique. I photograph the painting, then use ink to add about seven layers of blue - this is a special chemical color that changes under the influence of light and makes the painting work.

Separately, at the General Staff of the Hermitage, I present the video project “Love is a power supreme”. Globally speaking, my entire exhibition was created in the shape of a butterfly: if the works in the Winter Palace are its wings, then the video in the General Staff building is its body. Thanks to this, I want to combine the building of the “new” Hermitage, where the film will be shown, with the “old” one, where my paintings are exhibited. We plan to donate this film and several other works to the museum.

There is a lot of garbage in modern art, but there was a lot of garbage in Rubens’s time - where is the “garbage” now and where is Rubens?

“Knight of despair - warrior of beauty” - is this about you?

The title of the exhibition has its own romantic idea, which consists precisely in protecting the sensitivity and sensitivity that beauty contains within itself. On the other hand, this is also the image of a valiant knight who fights for good causes. But despair is in to a greater extent about me as an artist. Deep down, I always fear “defeat” or “failure.”

My family was not very rich. For my birthday, my father gave me small castles and fortresses. From my mother I received old lipsticks, which she no longer used, so that I could draw. It seems to me that my romantic soul and desire to always create something of my own grew out of childhood. This is partly why the definition of me as a “knight” appeared. But I myself am an artist who believes in hope, no matter how it sounds.

What is your mission as a knight?

Popularize classical art. It is the basis of everything, although at times it seems more restrained than the modern one. If we look at history, classical art has always been under the supervision of someone, be it the church or the monarchy. It’s a paradox, but at the same time it – art – played with them, limited itself.

In general, there is only one art in the world - good. It doesn't matter whether it's classic or modern, there are no boundaries between them. Therefore, it is important to teach people to recognize classical art so that they can better understand modern art. Of course, I do not deny that there is now a lot of garbage in the latter, but, listen, in the time of Rubens there was a lot of garbage - but where is this garbage now and where is Rubens!?

Jan Fabre looks impeccable - in patent black parquet shoes, a dark gray suit and a long gray coat with a gray fur collar, thick silver hair and graphic black frames of glasses. Taste and style, which are completely optional for a modern art figure, make him even more modern - he is beyond all cliches about the artist, both romantic and nonconformist. There is no special “bohemianism” in him, no ostentatious anti-consumerism, no boring bourgeoisism. He understands that clothes for a modern person are the same characteristic as the choice of music, like the choice of a favorite artist, like any intellectual choice in general. In Moscow, during a public talk at the Territory festival, he was wearing cool jeans with neat fraying, a white shirt and a thick blue sweater - and also impeccable in appearance. Fabre has a perfect sense of what to wear to sit in the small hall of the Gogol Center, and what to wear when running back and forth across Palace Square(one part of his exhibition is in the Winter Palace and the New Hermitage, the other in the General Staff Building). Fabre generally has a perfect sense of time and place, form and content.

He walks through the halls of the Hermitage on the eve of the opening, where not all the labels have yet been hung and not all the fences have been placed, and patiently answers the same questions from journalists - he recites a memorized text about what works he specially made for the Hermitage (a series of marble bas-reliefs “My queens" in the Van Dyck halls, a series of small paintings "Falsification of a secret celebration IV" in the Romanov Gallery), repeats his favorite self-definition - "I am a dwarf from the land of giants", tells a witty story about his beloved Rubens, "who was Andy Warhol 500 years ago" . And all this - for the 125th time - with lively energy, emotional and fiery, as if for the first time. “Art is not experience, but curiosity,” says Jan Fabre and demonstrates how brilliantly he masters this professional quality.

“I Let Myself Expire”, 2006

“I am a dwarf in a land of giants!”A series of small paintings “Falsification of a secret celebration IV”, 2016

Performance« Love is the highest power» , 2016

For the Hermitage, this is, of course, an unprecedented exhibition - never before among its walls and collections has contemporary art looked so convincingly, rather than simply arranged, and never before has modern art entered into a real dialogue with old art, rather than simply overshadowing it. Fabre in this sense is an ideal artist - especially for the Hermitage. He grew up in Antwerp, where he lived near Rubens's home and went there to copy his paintings, learning to paint and draw. He says that Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky and exhibition curator Dmitry Ozerkov gave him the opportunity to choose any halls, and he immediately decided that he would choose his native Flemings, among whom he grew up: “You best Rubens, great Jordaens, great Van Dijk, great Snyders.” Dmitry Ozerkov explains the principles of working with Hermitage paintings - the canvases could be moved left and right and up and down, but could not be swapped, although some paintings, for example, in the Rubens hall, were removed to hang Fabre’s blue canvases in their place - “ The Appearance and Disappearance of Bacchus”, “The Appearance and Disappearance of Christ”, “The Appearance and Disappearance of Antwerp”, where images appear only if you point a smartphone or camera at them. Nowhere would this statement by Fabre about the role of old art in modern art life look more appropriate than next to Rubens’ “Union of Earth and Water,” “Bacchus” and “Christ Crowned with Thorns.” “Avant-garde is always rooted in old art. There is no avant-garde without old art,” says Jan Fabre.

"A devoted guide to vanity." SeriesVanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, 2016

"The Appearance and Disappearance of Antwerp I", 2016. Rubens Hall

The reverence with which Fabre’s things are hung and arranged among the great Hermitage collection is extremely touching. In the Snyders hall hang Fabrov's signature skulls made of scarab beetles (their shells are purchased from restaurants in Southeast Asia), in the teeth of which there are stuffed birds and animals and, as if flowing, in the style of Dali, art brushes. A group made especially for the Hermitage - a skeleton made of scarabs and a stuffed swan in its arms - floats in the air against the backdrop of the same swan from the famous painting “Bird Concert”. And you understand that you are not just following Fabre’s witty play with the old masters, but you suddenly see this Snyders himself with a completely fresh look - the look of a person who grew up next to these paintings, spent hours copying them, absorbed from these paintings every feather of every bird and every scale every fish. That is, you see them with great love and gratitude.

Gravetomb and skulls series, 2000

One of the best rooms at the Fabre exhibition is the Van Dyck room. There are huge bas-reliefs made of Carrara marble “My Queens” - these are real women, Fabre’s acquaintances and friends, all in modern clothes, with earrings protruding from the bas-relief, freely hanging in their ears and carnival caps on their heads: “Brigitte of Antwerp” or “Helga” Ghent", for example. And in the center, on a high pedestal, stands the future Belgian Queen Elizabeth - the heir to the throne, who is now 14 years old, a fragile marble girl in jeans and a T-shirt and in the same cap. And the entire hall, filled with ceremonial Vandyck portraits with their emasculated gloss (you immediately remember Pushkin’s “Olga has no life in her features. Just like Vandyke’s Madonna”), immediately turns into a living and convincing hymn to modern women with their strength and fragility, freedom and struggle - everything that progressive fashion designers usually write about in press releases for their collections, but which is so difficult to express without completely worn cliches. Fabre knows how to do this - to say understandable things freshly and convincingly: “My goal is to protect the vulnerability of the human being.”

Series “My Queens”, 2016

What is shown in the General Staff building - large installations and large sculptures - is of a completely different kind. These are two large installations - “Red Transformer” and “Green Transformer” - and large-scale spatial objects. In the huge halls, next to Kabakov's "Red Car" and with a colossal Rubens on the wall, Fabre looks strictly conceptual and social. The most exciting thing here is to see how a work placed in a new context has a new meaning. For example, an installation with stuffed cats and dogs, which Fabre once made for the Geneva Museum and for which he collected dead animals on the sides of the highway: on the floor, under the stuffed animals hanging among the tinsel, there are unwrapped packs of butter. Fabre says that he was referring to the alchemical value of oil as a mediator, and the dog here, as in Flemish painting XVII century, is a symbol of fidelity and devotion. For us, it looks like a sharply social statement on the topic of human responsibility and big stories with poisoning of stray dogs. And this is the living life of art, which unfolds right here and now, in front of the viewer.

« Chapters I-XVIII» , 2010

"The Man Who Measures the Clouds", 1998

The fact that we have a Fabre exhibition is not just a joy. This is also a sign that we are finally beginning to recognize contemporary art in parallel with the whole world - because Jan Fabre is one of its most relevant figures today. And not just an artist, whose exhibitions are held in the grand museums of the world, but also a director, whose 24-hour performance “Mount Olympus” has become the main theatrical event of recent years, and an author of plays, and a video creator, and in general a humanist of Renaissance proportions. To see it is to see the main thing in modern art. And to see it in Russia means to see Russia in the context of the main contemporary art. And the way the small figurine of the golden man with a ruler in his hands—“The Man Who Measures the Clouds”—looks in the courtyard of the Hermitage is not at all what it looked like just now in the Belvedere fortress in Florence. Because, as Fabre says: “Every time you destroy, and then you build again.”

The editors of Buro 24/7 would like to thank Kempinski Hotel Moika 22 for their assistance in organizing the material.

On October 21, the Hermitage opened the exhibition “Jan Fabre: Knight of Despair - Warrior of Beauty,” prepared by the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage as part of the “Hermitage 20/21” project. One of the greatest masters of modern European art Belgian artist Jan Fabre presented two hundred and thirty works at the Hermitage: graphics, sculpture, installations, films. The exhibition caused a mixed reaction among museum visitors, which indicates the unconditional interest of the St. Petersburg audience in the creative statements of the author. The Hermitage receives letters from museum visitors criticizing Fabre's works and asking to remove some of the artist's works from the exhibition. We have prepared answers to the most frequently asked questions.

– Why is Fabre exhibited not only in the General Staff Building, which viewers are already accustomed to associating with contemporary art, but also in the Main Museum Complex?

Indeed, the works of Fabre. The idea to present Fabre in the Hermitage - in dialogue with the Flemish masters of the 17th century - arose seven years ago, when the director of the museum, Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, and Dmitry Ozerkov, head of the Department of Contemporary Art, visited the Jan Fabre exhibition in the Louvre, where the artist’s installation was adjacent to masterpieces Rubens. According to the curator of the project D. Ozerkov, “this is not an invasion. Fabre, a modern artist, comes to our museum not to compete with him, but to bend the knee before the old masters, before beauty. This exhibition is not about Fabre, it is about the energies of the Hermitage in its four contexts: the painting of the old masters, the history of buildings, the cradle of the revolution and the place where the tsars lived” (The Art Newspaper Russia).

Photo by Alexander Lavrentyev

The Belgian’s shimmering green compositions, created in the genre of vanitas vanitatum (vanity of vanities) on the motif of memento mori (remember death), are being introduced into the walls of the New Hermitage (Hall of Flemish and Dutch painting). Jan Fabre is a subtle colorist. In the Twelve Column Hall he works in the colors of gray marble and decorative gilding. His precious emerald panels remind the viewer of the Hermitage malachite bowls and tabletops, and of the decor of the Malachite Living Room of the Winter Palace.

Photo by Kirill Ikonnikov

His drawings with a "Bic" pen are close to the lapis lazuli of the Great Skylight vases of the New Hermitage.

Fabre’s laconic and austere reliefs with “queens” are adjacent to ceremonial portraits of the English nobility and court ladies by Anthony van Dyck.

Fabre’s proximity to Snyders’s “Shops” is fortunate; the contemporary artist does not quote Flemish master, but only carefully adds the motif of the skull - a meaning that is obvious to an art historian: the theme of vanity and the vanity of existence.

Photo by Valery Zubarov

Fabre himself, at a meeting with St. Petersburg residents in the Atrium of the General Staff Building, said that his works in the art halls of Flanders are designed to make viewers “stop, take time for art.” “Visitors walk past Rubens like they walk past the windows of a large store; they don’t look at the details,” says the artist.

– I appeal to all services of the State Hermitage! As an animal rights activist and volunteer, I consider it unacceptable for display to all age categories and destructive for the child’s psyche of a stuffed dog on hooks! The Jan Fabre exhibition is a lack of culture. This is especially immoral in light of the huge response to the cases of knackering in Khabarovsk. Please remove stuffed animals from the exhibition!

Jan Fabre has repeatedly told reporters that the dogs and cats that appear in his installations are stray animals that have died on the roads. Fabre tries to give them new life in art and thus defeat death. “Many of my works are dedicated to life after death. Death is part of life, I respect death,” says the famous Belgian. The dead dog in Fabre’s installation is a metaphor, a kind of self-portrait of the artist. Fabre states: “The artist is a stray dog.”

Fabre calls for careful treatment of animals, which have accompanied humanity for many centuries, entering history and mythology. Today, people's attitude towards animals is consumerist. Cats are left at dachas. Old dogs are kicked out of the house. By emphasizing cats and dogs in old art, Fabre shows that in all their qualities they are similar to people, and therefore their love and joy, their illness and death, are vilely forced out of our consciousness.

By presenting stuffed pets, Fabre, together with animal rights activists around the world, opposes consumerism towards them.

Often we love not animals, but our love for them. Calling them our little brothers, we often do not realize how cruelly we treat them. We are ready to get rid of them at the first opportunity, should the animal get sick or grow old. Jan Fabre is against this. He transforms the bodies of animals hit by cars along the highways from waste. consumer society- in reproach to human cruelty.

– Why couldn’t Fabre use artificial materials instead of stuffed animals? Modern technologies make it possible to make them completely indistinguishable from the real thing.

“Why marble and not plastic?” asks Fabre, answering this question at a meeting at the General Staff. “Marble is a tradition, Michelangelo, it is a tactilely different material. The material is the content.” This thesis of Fabre can be compared with the thought of Russian formalists about the unity of form and content.

For Jan Fabre, the “erotic relationship with the material,” the sensual component, is very important. He remembers that Flemish artists were alchemists, they used blood and crushed human bones to make paints. The artist views the body as “an amazing laboratory and battlefield.” For him, the body is “something beautiful and very powerful, but at the same time vulnerable.” When creating his monks for the installation “Umbraculum”, Fabre uses bones – the hollow, “spiritual bodies” of his characters have an “external skeleton”, they cannot be injured, they are protected.

Photo by Valery Zubarov

– Stuffed animals have no place in the Hermitage, they should be in the Zoological Museum.

In the Knights' Hall of the New Hermitage, horses from the Tsarskoye Selo Arsenal of Nicholas I are presented (these are horse skins stretched over a wooden base). In the Winter Palace of Peter I (Peter the Great's Office) a stuffed dog is exhibited; this is an Italian greyhound, one of the emperor's favorites. Their presence in the Hermitage does not seem strange or provocative to visitors, and does not cause fear or indignation.

Photo by Valery Zubarov

The artist uses certain means based on the principle of internal necessity and his own ultimate goal. To perceive contemporary art, a cursory glance is not enough; it requires (from each of us) inner work and spiritual effort. This effort is associated with overcoming stereotypes, prejudices, fear, ideological and psychological clichés, religious attitudes. It requires courage and patience, forcing us to expand the boundaries of our perception. Modern Art– this is something for which you cannot be completely prepared. Fabre himself says that his work is “related to the search for reconciliation and love. Love is the search for intense dialogue and civility.”

Photo by Valery Zubarov

Text: Tsibulya Alexandra, Dmitry Ozerkov

We also invite you to familiarize yourself with the following materials:

“Our goal has been achieved, people are talking about protecting animals”: Dmitry Ozerkov - about the scandal surrounding stuffed animals at an exhibition in the Hermitage (Paper)

The other day we visited the sensational exhibition of the Belgian artist Yana Fabra entitled " Jan Fabre: Knight of despair - warrior of beauty" And the first thing I would like to say about this is what is all the fuss about? Well, armor made from insect shells, well, pictures written in blood, well, stuffed animals. There is absolutely nothing criminal, harsh, or anti-aesthetic in all this (although the grannies keeping order in the halls Hermitage, judging by their faces, they have a different opinion).

One of the ardent animal defenders said something like, “I went to the exhibition and left in horror - there were dead animals there!” The question arises: why is no one horrified by the corpses of animals in zoological research?
uzee? Animal corpses displayed in a special place are normal, but stuffed animals among paintings are a shame. And after all, these are not sculptures from human bodies. Gunther von Hagens, which can really shock. By the way, horses in armor exhibited in the knights' hall Hermitage, animal rights activists and moral advocates also do not cause indignation. However, the scandal surrounding the exhibition played into the hands of the Hermitage and Fabre, as it caused a stir among tourists. So we became interested in looking at Fabre’s works precisely because of the hype around them.

Jan Fabre is one of the most famous contemporary artists . His grandfather was a famous French entomologist, which obviously influenced Fabre's work - insect parts and stuffed animals are the most common material in his work. In addition, the artist is known for his paintings written in blood, as well as drawings made with a ballpoint pen.

Fabre exhibition in Hermitage It is interesting because it is included in the permanent exhibition of the museum, and the artist’s works seem to enter into a dialogue with classical works of art. For example, next to the still lifes of Flemish painters Frans Snyders And Paul de Vos, which depict killed game, placed Fabre's stuffed animals being eaten by skulls. Next to the painting Jacob Jordaens“The Bean King”, depicting a feast, hangs Fabre’s work “After the King’s Feast”, made entirely from the elytra of golden beans.

By the way, these pictures Fabre insect shells are no less impressive than stuffed animals. And most of all, perhaps, we were impressed by the installation “I allow myself to bleed”, which is a silicon cop
the image of the artist himself, who seems to crash into a reproduction of the painting Rogier van der Weyden.

Recommended for 16+. Jan Fabre is one of the most fertile and important artists of his generation. He has created a number of new works especially for this exhibition numbering more than 200 artworks.

The Gilles of Binche in full regalia on Shrove Tuesday
FALSIFICATION DE LA FÊTE SECRETE IV Series
2016
20.3 x 16.8 cm
HB pencil, color pencil and crayons on chromo
© Angelos bvba/ Jan Fabre

The Appearance and Disappearance of Antwerp I
2016
124 x 165.3 cm
Ballpoint (bic) on Poly G-flm (Bonjet High Gloss white flm 200gr), dibond
© Angelos bvba/ Jan Fabre

The Appearance and Disappearance of Christ I
2016
124 x 165.3 cm
Ballpoint (bic) on Poly G-film (Bonjet High Gloss white film 200gr), dibond
© Angelos bvba/ Jan Fabre

The loyal ecstasy of death
Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas Series
2016
227 x 172 cm
Jewel beetle wing-cases on wood
© Angelos bvba/ Jan Fabre

Jan Fabre (Antwerp, 1958), a visual artist, theater artist and author, uses his works to speculate in a loud and tangible manner about life and death, physical and social transformations, as well as about the cruel and intelligent imagination which is present in both animals and humans.

For more than thirty-five years Jan Fabre has been one of the most innovative and important figures on the international contemporary art scene. As a visual artist, theater maker and author he has created a highly personal world with its own rules and laws, as well as its own characters, symbols, and recurring motifs. Influenced by research carried out by the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), he became fascinated by the world of insects and other creatures at a very young age. In the late seventies, while studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and Crafts in Antwerp, he explored ways of extending his research to the domain of the human body. His own performances and actions, from 1976 to the present, have been essential to his artistic journey. Jan Fabre's language involves a variety of materials and is situated in a world of his own, populated by bodies in a balance between the opposites that define natural existence. Metamorphosis is a key concept in any approach to Jan Fabre’s body of thought, in which human and animal life are in constant interaction. He unfolds his universe through his author’s texts and nocturnal notes, published in the volumes of his Night Diary. As a consilience artist, he has merged performance art and theater. Jan Fabre has changed the idiom of the theater by bringing real time and real action to the stage. After his historic eight-hour production "This is theater like it was to be expected and foreseen" (1982) and four-hour production "The power of theatrical madness" (1984), he raised his work to a new level in the exceptional and monumental "Mount Olympus. To glorify the cult of tragedy, a 24-hour performance" (2015).

Jan Fabre has earned the recognition of a worldwide audience with "Tivoli" castle (1990) and with permanent public works in sites of historical importance, such as "Heaven of Delight" (2002) at the Royal Palace in Brussels, "The Gaze Within ( The Hour Blue)" (2011 – 2013) in the Royal Staircase of the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels and his latest installation in the Antwerp Cathedral of "The man who bears the cross" (2015).

He is known for solo exhibitions such as "Homo Faber" (KMSKA, Antwerp, 2006), "Hortus / Corpus" (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, 2011) and "Stigmata. Actions and Performances", 1976–2013 (MAXXI, Rome, 2013; M HKA, Antwerp, 2015; MAC, Lyon, 2016). He was the first living artist to present a large-scale exhibition at the Louvre, Paris (“L’ange de la métamorphose”, 2008). The well-known series "The Hour Blue" (1977 – 1992) was displayed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (2011), in the Musée d'Art Moderne of Saint-Etienne (2012) and in the Busan Museum of Art (2013) ). His research on “the sexiest part of the body”, namely the brain, was presented in the solo shows “Anthropology of a planet” (Palazzo Benzon, Venice, 2007), " From the Cellar to the Attic, From the Feet to the Brain" (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2008; Arsenale Novissimo, Venice, 2009), and "PIETAS" (Nuova Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia, Venice, 2011; Parkloods Park Spoor Noord, Antwerp , 2012). The two series of mosaics made with the wing cases of the jewel scarab "Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo" (2011 – 2013) and "Tribute to Belgian Congo" (2010– 2013) were shown at the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev (2013) and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille (2013) and will travel to 's-Hertogenbosch in 2016 for the 500th anniversary celebration of Hieronymus Bosch.

As emphasized by the artist and acknowledged by critics and researchers, his art goes back to the traditions of classic Flemish art, which he admires. Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens are important inspirations, and the visitors will (or won’t) see it for themselves. For the exhibition period, Fabre’s works will make part of the museum’s permanent exhibition and enter into a dialogue with the absolute international masterpieces. The idea of the exhibition appeared after Jan Fabre had a large scale solo exhibition Jan Fabre. L'ange de la métamorphose at the Flanders and the Netherlands Rooms at the Louvre in 2008.

At the Hermitage halls, this “sketch” will develop into a major art event that is sure to spark a great interest and many debates, which are to be held at another intellectual discussion marathon. The exhibition will come with a series of lectures, master classes and round-table discussions. The exposition will air eight films, including the performance film Love is the Power Supreme (2016) featuring the artist, which was filmed in the Winter Palace in June 2016. This work will remain in the collection of The State Hermitage Collection. As a grandson of a famous entomologist, Jan Fabre widely uses the wildlife aesthetics. He uses beetle shells, animal skeletons and horns, as well as stuffed animals and images of animals in various materials. The list of unusual materials goes beyond that and covers blood and BIC blue ink.

The exhibition has been organized by the Contemporary Art Department at the State Hermitage in a frame of the Hermitage 20/21 Project. It is under patronage of V St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum.