FABRICE HYBER - La Foresta Invisibile -
Espace Louis Vuitton - Venezia
“Venice was built upon a vast forest of oak, larch and alder. Of these millions of trees, a few are coming back to life. They are sometimes glimpsed in the reflections, secret spaces and shadows of Venice. Here, they are crystallised in glass. I imagined a house within another house, blurring the perception of what is outside and what is inside. Then, in the glass of these houses, the trees of the Invisible Forest appear.” (Fabrice Hyber)
The Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is pleased to announce the opening of its new exhibition, displaying an exclusive installation by French artist Fabrice Hyber. This presentation has been produced in the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton “Hors-les-murs” programme, which unfolds at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, realising the Fondation’s commitment to mount international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.
At the invitation of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and in parallel with La Biennale Architettura 2023, Fabrice Hyber creates La Foresta Invisibile [The Invisible Forest], an in-situ work addressing the future challenges the world will face, particularly ecological concerns.
Hyber, having studied sciences before enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (France), began producing works in the 1980s that garnered notice on the artistic scene. His practice of painting and drawing, the starting point for each of his projects, is a way for him to present hypotheses, dovetail ideas, invent forms and play with words. Traced on large canvases, many-branched trees, hybrid beings, modified objects, numbers and symbols reflect his proliferation of thought, open to many other techniques. He incorporates fields as varied as mathematics, neurosciences, commerce, history and astrophysics into the realm of art, along with love, the body, nature and living things. These last two are central to the work of this artist who has adopted green (“Hyber green”) as his colour. Since the 1990s, he has been growing a forest deep in a valley in Vendée, in the Pays de la Loire region of western France, where he spent his childhood. These trees are integral to his work.
Inside the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, Hyber is bringing the forest of Venice back to life: the trunks of trees planted in the silt several centuries ago to stabilise the islands made it possible to build the city. This forest of wooden pillars forms the city’s base. Some of those tree trunks, long hidden and silent beneath the foundations, reappear here like ancient ghosts. Glass is an indelible element in the Venetian imagination and a material that fascinates the artist, who, alongside a master glassmaker in Switzerland, embraces it for his work. The blown and flat glass that he designs and colours is made in Basel.
In this exhibit, glass trees and celestial bodies form a monumental stained-glass window framing a space containing both the house and the clearing. Within, shadows dance and become light, bringing the place to life, beckoning us to daydream in this crystallised forest and to wonder about the place’s history and memory in light of today’s challenges.
Two paintings from a set of the artist’s works belonging to the Collection are included in this in-situ creation.
About the artist
Fabrice Hyber, born in 1961 in Luçon, France, has had his prolific work presented in numerous solo exhibitions, all singular events and designed to appeal to a wide audience. In 1995, he made headlines by transforming Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne into a “Hybertmarket”, complete with muzak in the background, and was at the centre of a minor scandal when he received the Golden Lion at La Biennale di Venezia in 1997 for Eau d’or. Eau dort. ODOR after having transformed the French Pavilion into a television studio.
His recent exhibitions include La Vallée, Fondation Cartier in Paris, France (2022-2023); Formes des mots, MuHKA in Antwerp, Belgium (2015); Raw Materials, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, United Kingdom (2013); Matières premières, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France (2012); Essentiel, Peintures homéopathiques, Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France (2012); and Prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement (POF), MAC VAL in Vitry, France (2012).
Hyber cares deeply about the problems posed by society and, to express his commitment to improvement, has executed many commissions for public spaces, such as his Homme de Bessines, little green men whose various bodily orifices spurt cascades of water, installed in cities in France and abroad since 1991; L’Artère – le jardin des dessins in the Parc de La Villette in Paris, which raises awareness about HIV while serving as a space for reflection, expression and recreation; and Le Cri, l’Écrit, also in Paris in the Jardin du Luxembourg, commemorating the abolition of slavery. In 2018, at the request of architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, he designed the glass ceiling at the Hôtel Lutetia, followed by Les deux chênes for the Beaupassage pedestrian dining area, both in Paris.
As he is particularly interested in science, he collaborates regularly with the Institut Pasteur – since 2010 and most recently in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, connecting artists and researchers. In a similar vein, in the 1990s, he helped generate projects between artists and entrepreneurs through his company Unlimited Responsibility. Hyber, keenly attuned to the human and ecological condition, poetically interprets these themes in his work, forged through communication, interaction and hybridisation in an artistic “laboratory” of his making to express a yet-to-be-invented future.
About the Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20thcentury works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organises seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of the 21st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation’s seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than seven million visitors from France and around the world. The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism) among others. The artistic direction also developed a specific “Hors-les-murs” programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, which are exclusively devoted to exhibitions of works from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge and promoted through specific cultural communication.