What if a sculpture were not something to look at, but a place to enter? This question runs through Luciano Fabro’s work and lies at the heart of Inhabiting Space, at Pirelli HangarBicocca. Around fifty works retrace the career of one of the key figures of Arte Povera, while revealing how personal and independent his path remained. For Fabro, space is never a neutral backdrop: it comes alive through the body, the gaze, light and materials. Marble, bronze, glass, mirrors, silk, lead and even paper become tools for changing the way we perceive our surroundings. Reflective surfaces multiply space, while seemingly simple forms play with the visible and invisible, presence and absence. The exhibition moves from his experiments of the 1960s to his “habitats”, environments designed to be entered and experienced. Some are reconstructed in the vast Navate according to the artist’s plans. Here sculpture, painting and architecture lose their boundaries. For Fabro, art emerges precisely from the encounter between artwork, space and viewer: it does not represent the world, but invites us to experience it differently.
