Luciano Fabro
From October 8, 2026, to February 21, 2027, Pirelli HangarBicocca will present "Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space," the first museum retrospective dedicated to Luciano Fabro in Italy since the artist’s death in nearly two decades. The exhibition delves into the concept of "habitat"—the cornerstone of his perceptual and spatial research through an extensive presentation that brings together around fifty of the artist's most significant sculptures and installations, tracing the entirety of the artist’s career.
Luciano Fabro: the artist
A central figure in postwar Italian art, Luciano Fabro was a leading member of the Arte Povera movement, while constantly maintaining an independent and nonconformist approach to artistic research. From the beginning of his career, he developed a distinctive understanding to the notion of inhabiting space, conceived by the artist as a dynamic field of action, whilst examining the act of looking, the experience, and the relationship between the viewer, the artworks and the surrounding environment. He experimented extensively with the expressive potential of a wide range of materials, ranging from more traditional media such as marble, glass, and bronze to less conventional ones, such as silk and lead, each chosen for its sensory and evocative qualities. The artist developed an open, layered body of work in which materials and languages intertwine in an exploration that is simultaneously reflective, sensual, rigorous, and dynamic.
The exhibition “Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space” at Pirelli HangarBicocca
The exhibition “Abitare lo spazio. Inhabiting Space” brings together around fifty of Fabro's most significant sculptures and installations. It examines the artist’s conceptual and formal research to space, exploring the ways it engages with the perception of those who inhabit it. Emphasis is placed on Fabro’s investigations into perception and spatial experience, initiated in the 1960s, tracing their development from his early experiments with mirroring surfaces through the following fifty years. This evolution culminated in increasingly complex architectural structures and spaces—often made of paper—which the artist referred to as "habitats": ideal environment, either autonomous/self-contained or integrated into existing spaces, conceived to house and activate his sculptures. The exhibition path in Pirelli HangarBicocca alternates individual works with large-scale environmental installations that comprise multiple pieces, conceived as parts of a single spatial display, alongside a number of habitats reconstructed in the Navate following the artist’s death, on the basis of his original plans and instructions.
