Self-portraits donated from Jan Fabre’s chapters

FLORENCE, ITALY – The Uffizi Gallery’s vast collection of self-portraits is to acquire two new works, the self-portraits of Belgian artist Jan Fabre, which he has donated to the museum and which will remain on display in the Sala del Camino on the first floor of the Uffizi until 30 September.

Draughtsman, sculptor, choreographer and set designer, this 54-year-old Belgian artist of international renown will now have his place in the Uffizi’s collection of self-portraits thanks to the initiative of Giovanna Giusti, the director of the Uffizi’s 19th Century and Contemporary Art Department, and of Nicole d’Huart and Damien Wigny, two people who fell in love with the art of Tuscany and of Florence and put Ms. Giusti in touch with a number of Belgian artists, including Fabre, thus paving the way for the acquisition of major new works. In 2010 Jan Fabre conceived a series of eighteen self-portraits (which he called “Chapters”), moulded in wax with bloodstain marbling and then cast in bronze for display in museums or even in the open air, scattered about a wood.

The sole common denominator in the series is the artist’s face, enriched and transformed by spectacular ramifications, horns, mythological memories, or an ass’s ears, constituting a fully-fledged anthropomorphic Bestiarium. The works that the artist has chosen to donate to the Uffizi are “Chapters” VIII (with a ram’s horns) and XI (with an ass’s ears) from his series of self-portraits.

As Cristina Acidini, director general of the Polo Museale Fiorentino, writes in the “Study and Research” brochure accompanying the presentation of the sculptures: “The two bronze self-portraits by Jan Fabre, a Belgian artist whose figurative work is inclined to provoke rather than to appease, are an interesting and, at the same time, a disturbing addition to the Uffizi’s famous collection of self-portraits. Based on our knowledge of the artist and his work, we may wonder whether this dual hybridization, achieved through the teratomorphic expansion of the head – with its ass’s ears and sheep’s horns – may not be one of the paradoxes that permeate his both his art and his performances.

If it is, we have no choice but to interpret his gesture as an emblem of our times – times of which Fabre is a cutting-edge representative and a critical exponent”. Her thoughts are echoed by Antonio Natali, the director of the Uffizi Gallery, who says: “When I see the two self-portraits Jan Fabre has donated to the Uffizi and the rest of the series, I find it hard not to smile back, aware of the jest and of the fact that I, the observer, am its butt. I prefer to join in the joke and take the mockery like a man rather than joining the chorus of exegetes eagerly dissecting Fabre’s heads with the scalpel of psychoanalysis. People pay too little attention to the ironic, at times downright scornful, side that is a feature of so much modern art, yet irony and scorn boast a noble and ancient tradition. (…) This brazen artist offers himself to us, a latter-day Narcissus, in as many guises as some ancient Egyptian divinity, setting himself up at the back of his own sanctuary to receive the naive veneration of the faithful bent on penetrating the arcane mystery”.

Giovanna Giusti, for her part, has chosen to highlight the fact that, thanks to this donation, “in one fell swoop Jan Fabre will become both the thirty-fourth Belgian artist (sharing the honour of representing his country with Rubens, Van Dyck, Sevin, Ensor and de Bruyckere) and in some ways also the thirty-fifth, because in doubling his image, he is in effect entrusting the enigma of his thought to two solutions”.

Finally, art critic German Celant writes that “this kind of work is unquestionably influenced by the Classical zoomorphic repertoire, so it is interesting that the sculptures should have found their ‘lair’ in the Uffizi, where a varied menagerie of imaginary figures has been living and feeding for centuries”. The donation of these two self-portraits comes 33 years after the exhibition on “Contemporary Flemish Art” held in Palazzo Rucellai in 1979, in the course of which Jan Fabre paid repeated visits to the Uffizi Gallery, carefully noting down his impressions and feelings. In memory of that event and to confirm the bond that exists between the Belgian artist and the Uffizi, the brochure accompanying the presentation of the exhibitions contains a few notes taken from the Nighttime Diary which the artist kept between 1978 and 1984.