Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Italy
Jan Fabre: From the Feet to the Brain

Belgian artist Jan Fabre’s new work series From the Cellar to the Attic – From the Feet to the Brain, which he elaborated for the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2008, consisted of five room-filling sculptural tableaux documenting a mythical world of horror, beauty, and metamorphosis.The installation followed the layout of the human body: five exhibition levels with metaphoric titles borrowed from different zones of the body – starting with the feet in the basement and ending with the brain on the upper level creating thus a gesamtkunstwerk.

Jan Fabre will be installing his five sculptural tableaux at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

According to Eckhard Schneider, General Director of the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, Fabre's basic principles can be broken down as follows: 1. the awareness of the power of the images of the real that was discovered in the Flemish Primitives, further developed through the visual force of performances and theater, and finally emerged in the form of sculptural tableaus; 2. the extreme concentration on the body as the crystallization point between life and death, agony and fulfillment; 3. the fascination for the insect as a symbol of metamorphosis, as the subject of intense investigations, and as an important material for drawings, objects, and wall and room-filling installations; 4. the constant application of the mechanical, self-driven principle in all artistic activities, a principle that originates from the discovery of the body and the behavior of insects; 5. the fascination for mirroring and doubling, which is the point of departure for many works.