Fabrice Hyber | The Forest

Curator: Dalia Levin

Jan. 7, 2006 - March 18, 2006

Petrol, 2005, drawing on canvas, video, outdoor installation
פבריס איבר
Fabrice Hyber is among the leading artists in France, a multidisciplinary artist operating in diverse practices and fields ranging from drawings, paintings and objects to videos, installations, and performances. Exhibiting extensively throughout the world, he has gained international recognition and success. Among his most conspicuous achievements one may mention the Golden Lion Award he received at the 1997 Venice Biennale for his work at the French Pavilion, which he transformed into a working television studio inviting audience interaction. In 1991 he created the sculpture Translation which consisted of the world’s biggest bar of soap recorded in the Guinness Book of Records. In 1994 Hyber founded a company, Unlimited Responsibility (UR), which specializes in productions and project exchange between artists and companies. Recently he completed a unique project at Parc de la Villette in Paris, an enormous jigsaw-puzzle of drawings on ceramic tiles addressing the fight against AIDS.

Hyber explores issues pertaining to volume, scale, biology, methods of operation, and types of communication. His art sets out to examine the way we communicate, and to mimic the endless affinities between ideas. His works attempt to interpret and resolve the complexity of reality by constantly searching for possible, or impossible, hypotheses. Every exhibition is, for him, an experimental workshop.

For the exhibition Petrol, Hyber covered the Museum’s concrete wall with a monumental drawing of trees on canvas. According to Hyber, drawing and painting are the basic stages in all of his works, an immediate expression allowing for the birth of his ideas, reflecting, as it were, the visibility and proliferation of thought. Observation of the free hand drawings usually executed at great speed provides an opportunity to follow Hyber’s work process. Petrol also extends outside the museum walls. Hyber performed an intervention on the Eucalyptus tree in the entrance yard, imprinting it with a piece of baobab wood on which he painted that will merge into the tree in the course of time via a slow organic process.

In addition to the wall of drawings Hyber presents several video works, among them his first animation piece (Moon) from 1981, as well as a compilation of five humorous videos pertaining to trees. This group belongs to a video series that presents and illustrates the uses of POF – Prototypes d’Objects en Fonctionnement (“Prototypes for Functional Objects”). For several years now Hyber has been producing and inventing sculptures which are, in fact, mutations of banal, everyday objects. “These are objects which I create before I know what their use might be.” The sculptures introduce a new, nonfunctional alternative to objects, shifting their primary meaning. In order to examine and apply the use of POF, Hyber has created short videos (some 150 so far) with French drag artist, Eliane Pine Carrington, who demonstrates their new absurd functioning for the viewer.

Fabrice Hyber (1961) was born in Lucon, France. Lives and works in Paris.

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