Pirelli Hangar Bicocca presents "Luciano Fabro. Abitare lo spazio"
8 October- 21 February 2027
From 8 October 2026 to 21 February 2027, Pirelli HangarBicocca presents Abitare lo spazio, the first museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to Luciano Fabro since his death. The exhibition highlights the remarkable contemporary relevance of his research, revealing the intellectual sophistication, experimental freedom and perceptual sensitivity that distinguished his work. Spanning the artist’s entire career, the exhibition explores the concept of the “Habitat”, a central element of Fabro’s investigation into perception and space, inviting visitors to experience an immersive journey through the world of sensations and the limits of the perceptible.
A central figure in post-war Italian art, Luciano Fabro (Turin, 1936 – Milan, 2007) was a leading exponent of Arte Povera, while always maintaining a distinctly individual and independent approach to artistic research. From the beginning of his career, he developed a personal investigation into the idea of inhabiting space — understood as a dynamic field of action — while exploring vision, experience and the relationship between the viewer, the artwork and its environment.
Inevitably engaging with Lucio Fontana’s (1899–1968) Ambienti Spaziali and the conceptual investigations developed by Piero Manzoni (1933–1963), Fabro’s practice focused particularly on the language of sculpture, which he regarded as an essential tool for reading and interpreting the forms of experience. In doing so, he radically redefined the relationship between the sculptural element and its surrounding space.
Fabro experimented with the expressive potential of a wide variety of materials, ranging from traditional ones such as marble, glass and bronze to less conventional materials including silk and lead, each selected for its sensory and evocative qualities. Influenced by a renewed interest in Baroque sensibility, his works employ reflective surfaces, glass and mirrors to fragment and multiply the surrounding space, heightening contrasts and exploring the relationship between presence and absence, the visible and the invisible.
At the intersection of sculpture, painting and architecture, Fabro developed processes that emphasised the cross-pollination between these disciplines, employing apparently simple forms to generate complex meanings. Defining painting as “vision” and sculpture as “revelation”, the artist created an open and multilayered body of work in which materials and languages intertwine within an investigation that is at once reflective and sensual, rigorous and dynamic.
Alongside his artistic production, Fabro developed a rigorous theoretical approach, making significant contributions to art theory through meticulous conceptual reflection and an extensive body of writing. At the heart of his thinking lies a constant tension between the autonomy of the work of art — understood as a complete form and a principle of order — and the realm of sensory experience, through which the work acquires meaning in its encounter with the real world.
His sculptures and installations thus become spaces of equilibrium between these two poles, where conceptual rigour and perception, formal autonomy and relationship coexist in a state of continuous openness. This solid intellectual foundation fuelled the creation of imaginative and multilayered works, often characterised by subtle irony, which helped redefine and expand the field of contemporary sculpture.
More than a decade after his last major international exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2014, the Italian retrospective also offers an opportunity to reflect on Luciano Fabro’s profound connection with the city of Milan. After spending his childhood in Friuli, Fabro moved to Milan in 1959, finding in the city’s vibrant cultural environment fertile ground for the development of his research.
Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, together with Hidetoshi Nagasawa (1940–2018) and Jole De Sanna (1947–2004), he founded the Casa degli Artisti, transforming it into a laboratory for dialogue and experimentation open to younger generations. From 1983 to 2002, he also taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, inspiring numerous artists of his own time as well as subsequent generations.
"Abitare lo spazio" is the title of the first museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to Luciano Fabro since his death in 2007. Curated at Pirelli HangarBicocca by Fiammetta Griccioli, Roberta Tenconi and Vicente Todolí, in collaboration with Silvia Fabro (Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro), the exhibition presents approximately fifty of the most significant sculptures and installations from across the artist’s career.
The exhibition examines Fabro’s conceptual and formal approach to space, exploring the ways in which it enters into dialogue with the perception of those who inhabit it. Particular attention is devoted to the perceptual and spatial research initiated by the artist in the 1960s, tracing its development from his earliest experiments with mirrored surfaces through the following five decades, culminating in increasingly complex architectural structures and spaces, often made of paper, which the artist defined as “habitats”: ideal environments — either autonomous or integrated into existing spaces — conceived to accommodate and activate his works.
The concept of habitat runs through Fabro’s research from the 1960s onwards, although the artist only began using the term itself in the 1980s. Fabro’s habitat combines a material and artisanal dimension with theoretical and philosophical inquiry.
The notion evokes a dual etymological origin: the verb habito, meaning to inhabit a particular place, and the noun habitus, referring to outward appearance, the form of the body or clothing. From this perspective, the habitat becomes a space to move through and inhabit, but also a device capable of directing perception and generating relationships.
Bringing together sculpture, architecture and painting, Fabro creates pathways, perspectives and architectural elements that transform the perception of space. Conceived either as interventions within existing exhibition spaces or as autonomous environments, the habitats move beyond the neutrality of the white cube through the use of light and ephemeral materials such as paper, defining new spatial configurations while accommodating other works by the artist.
In many respects, these environments evoke the welcoming character of Baroque piazzas while also engaging with the radical and relational experiments in urbanism developed during the 1960s and 1970s. The artwork is therefore not simply observed but experienced and inhabited within a dynamic system in which space, body and perception continuously influence one another.
Fabro defined the habitat as a topos: a constructed place capable of generating logos — and therefore meaning, relationships and community. As the artist explained: “It is therefore clear that installations do not interest me: they create a fictitious construction within a fictitious situation. The Habitat, on the other hand, is not fictitious. It is entirely real: the light is real, a wall is a wall. It is not mimesis; it belongs to a situation in which one is present, it presupposes that someone is there. Otherwise, it is not a Habitat.”
The exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca alternates individual works with large-scale environments containing multiple works conceived as elements of a single spatial device, as well as several habitats reconstructed in the Navate after the artist’s death on the basis of his original plans and instructions.
The exhibition opens with La Dialettica (1985), created for the Paris Biennale that same year and presented according to the original installation conceived by the artist for the Grande Halle de la Villette. The work consists of a fragment of marble marked by vertical striations, with an eye and a mouth carved into its polished front surface. Two cables rise from a hole running through the marble and support a web made of brass chains that extends upwards towards the highest point of the industrial space.
The title refers to Paolo Caliari’s (1528–1588), known as Veronese, painting Dialettica (or Industria) (1575–77), an oil on canvas located on the ceiling of the Sala del Collegio in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which Fabro conceptually reinterprets through marble and the fragile brass structure.
The first section of the exhibition develops the concept of personal space, part of the investigation Fabro began in the 1960s. Emblematic of this research is In cubo (1966), a wooden frame covered on five sides with white canvas, which visitors must lift in order to enter an enclosed space while remaining perceptually connected to the outside world through the light filtering through the fabric.
Conceived as a personal space, the work transforms the visitor’s body into an integral part of its configuration. The first version was calibrated to Fabro’s own measurements: its dimensions corresponded to his height and to the width of his outstretched arms, emphasising the absence of a clear distinction between subject and object and the continuity between “outside” and “inside”. Fabro subsequently created a version “for Carla”, referring to art critic Carla Lonzi, who was particularly close to the artist. At Pirelli HangarBicocca, five versions of the work in different dimensions will be presented, allowing visitors to find the one most closely suited to their own height.
Further along the exhibition route is Io rappresento l’ingombro dell’oggetto nella vanità dell’ideologia (Lo Spirato) (1968–73), a marble bed and one of Fabro’s most iconic works. The refinement with which its drapery is rendered evokes the tradition of Baroque sculpture. Engaging with art history from a contemporary perspective, Fabro makes presence visible through absence.
The body beneath the sheet is no longer there, yet the memory of its volume and weight remains imprinted on the sheet and pillow. The artist captures the moment in which the body has already slipped away and the fabric is gradually settling back onto the mattress, stimulating both memory and imagination. As Fabro himself explained, the subject of Lo Spirato is the sheet: “It is not a narrative theme, but a proposition: that which lies between fullness and emptiness, not a pre-existing subject, neither real nor unreal, nor narrated.”
At the centre of the Navate, Habitat di Rotterdam (1981) will be presented. Luciano Fabro conceived the work for his retrospective at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1981. The space is reconstructed in faithful accordance with its original configuration, preserving its dimensions and its division into five corridors defined by paper-covered walls.
Around twenty works are displayed within it, including several of the celebrated Italie, creating a kind of retrospective within the retrospective. The articulation of the space and arrangement of the works — positioned on the partitions and within the gaps between them — derive from a dynamic geometric composition based on a series of circles extending from a vanishing point and responding to the dimensions of the Rotterdam museum.
Traces of this composition, ideally projected beyond the building itself, reappear on the floor as white lines that reveal its trajectory, extending the imagination beyond the physical limits of the space. Through paper walls and structures, Fabro creates an environment of views, openings and pathways to be explored, inviting visitors to discover new relationships between matter, space and perception. As the artist himself described it, it is “a place-topos... the place where the senses are excited.”
The exhibition subsequently presents works connected to Fabro’s cosmological reflections and his investigation of metaphysical space, including Il Sole (1995–97) and La Luna (1995–97). The former consists of a rhythmic sequence of marble elements engraved with a radial solar motif and arranged horizontally, recalling a Doric column. In contrast, La Luna is a vertical cylindrical sculpture carved from dark Portoro marble.
Through architectural and mythological references, Fabro invests his works with the ability to transmit knowledge and construct cultural memory over time. The same section will feature one of Fabro’s final, previously unseen works, Eclissi di cielo (2006).
Presented together, the three works evoke several themes central to his practice, including experiments with volume, line and spatial tension, as well as an exploration of dualities through systems of opposites: light and darkness, white and black, lightness and weight, change and rootedness, horizontality and verticality, openness and closure, fragment and totality.
Finally, the Cubo will host È la vita, è la storia, è la morale (1995), presented at the Venice Biennale in 1997. The work is a large suspended structure, five metres high and organised across three levels corresponding to the concepts evoked by its title, which Fabro conceived as closely interdependent.
The upper level, dedicated to morality, consists of a print on acetate suspended by a silk thread and recalls the image of a starry sky evoked by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). At the centre is history, composed of a fabric reproducing the negative of the sheets in the lower layer, representing life. The latter derives from a diagram featured in Laurence Sterne’s (1713–1768) novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), which Fabro adopts as a representation of existence: a non-linear path marked by constant interruptions and deviations.
The Artist
Among Luciano Fabro’s numerous solo exhibitions are: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); Kunstmuseum Winterthur and GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2013); Madre – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples (2007, 2004); Musée Bourdelle, Paris (2004); Tate Gallery, London (1997); Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro (1997); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1996); Portikus, Frankfurt (1996); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1992); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (1991); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (1990); Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin (1989); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1988); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1987); Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany (1983); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1981); and PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (1980).
His work has also been presented at major biennials and international exhibitions, including the Biennale of Sydney (2018, 1988); Quadriennale d’arte, Rome (2008, 1973); Venice Biennale (1997, 1993, 1986, 1984, 1980, 1978, 1975, 1972); Bienal de São Paulo (1996, 1975); documenta, Kassel (1992, 1982, 1972); Biennale de Paris (1985, 1971); and Tokyo Biennale (1970).
Luciano Fabro received numerous prestigious awards and honours, including Accademico d’Onore, Florence (2004); the Coutts Contemporary Art Award, Zurich (1994); Premio Antonio Feltrinelli, Rome (1993); the Sikkens Prize, Rotterdam (1987); and the Art Prize, Aachen (1983).
Catalogue
Published on the occasion of the retrospective, the catalogue offers an extensive examination of Luciano Fabro’s artistic practice through a series of essays focusing on key moments, works and themes in his research: from 1968, a pivotal year marking a turning point in his career, to his dialogue with the Baroque and its various manifestations; from representations of the female figure to the cosmological dimension of his work; and in-depth studies of emblematic works and projects such as Allestimento teatrale. Cubo di specchi and the Habitat created in Rotterdam for his 1981 retrospective at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
Commissioned specifically for the publication, the essays are written by international art historians, curators and scholars, including Stefano Chiodi, Catherine Grenier, Sharon Hecker, Frances Morris, Iolanda Ratti, Margit Rowell, Francesco Stocchi and Andrea Viliani.
The publication also includes Martin Schwander’s reconsideration and contextualisation of his 1991 interview with Fabro; the 1983 conversation between the artist and Bruno Corà — a key text in the definition and theorisation of the concept of Habitat — and an extensive essay by Rudi Fuchs devoted to sculptural practice in public space.
The monograph is further enriched by a chronology tracing the evolution of Fabro’s work from its beginnings, accompanied by a selection of previously unpublished archival images curated by Teodora di Robilant and Silvia Fabro, who has also written detailed entries on the works included in the exhibition.
The volume concludes with an introduction to the project by Vicente Todolí and an essay by Fiammetta Griccioli and Roberta Tenconi examining the evolution of Fabro’s spatial research and the development of the concept of Habitat. Extensive photographic documentation of the installation at Pirelli HangarBicocca, together with a rich selection of historical and visual materials, completes the publication.
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Abitare lo spazio
8 October 2026
Pirelli HangarBicocca
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