Luciano Fabro at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

This anthological exhibition, the first to be held since the Luciano Fabro‘s (1936 – 2007) death, gathers a constellation of works that are fundamental for an understanding of the singularity of the artist’s oeuvre and features over 60 artworks from diverse private collections and international public institutions. His art associates the use of simple and common materials that redefine the nature of the object and its space with a constant poetic reflection on the practice of sculpture, evident in the numerous texts in which the artist has always related thought with experimentation in new practices.

Emblematic series like Italy, in which the artist explores the cartographic outline of the famous “boot” through its association with an extraordinary diversity of materials in an acute critical perception of the portrait of today’s Italy, or Piedi, a metamorphosis of the relationship between object and architecture, pedestal and sculpture, are shown alongside his earliest reflections on transparency, such as Impronta, Mezzo Specchiato Mezzo Trasparente and Tutto Trasparente.

From the conceptual project to reconfigure the façade of the Church of the Redeemer in Venice, to the many works in which marble is used in awareness both of tradition and the urgent need to break with it, such as that wonderful synthesis and ineffable self-portrait of the disappearance of the artist in his own work entitled Lo Spirato, a sculpture shown here for the first time outside Italy, this show sums up Luciano Fabro’s oeuvre as an essential chapter for understanding and questioning the paths of contemporary sculpture and the new enigmas and dilemmas posed for the understanding and interpretation of the viewer. Along with other influential marble pieces such as Nadezda and Il giorno mi pesa sulla note, the exhibition also includes one of his most famous Habitat works, Habitat 1962, that will give a representative example of the distinct redefinition of architectural space through sculptural intervention.