Career
In 1981, he produced his first painting, Square meter of lipstick. It was exhibited it in 1984 at the International Drawing Biennial of Saint-Étienne. In 1986, it was showcased at the International Workshops of the Pays de la Loire at the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud. That same year he presented his first solo exhibition, "Mutation", in Nantes. [1]
Since 1986, he has presented solo exhibitions in Montreal, Limoges, Poitiers, Strasbourg, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Zurich, Bruges, Sète, and Guadalajara.
In 2000, he was entrusted with a project for the Arc de Triomphe. In 2001, Sidaction commissioned him to create a monumental work, L'Artère, installed in the Parc de la Villette, a project he developed between 2002 and 2006.
In 2004, Fabrice Hyber announced: “From May 1, 2004, I decided, in full possession of my means, that is to say in full health, to remove the “t” of Hybert”. [2] In 2007, he installed The Scream, the Written in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a public commission commemorating the abolition of slavery. [3] At the same time, he continued a process launched around 1990 by sowing trees in his childhood valley. [4]
As part of his ongoing experimental practice, Hyber established a sculpture garden in Japan and another in Texas. He also collaborated with the architectural firm "Jakob + MacFarlane" on the Euronews headquarters in Lyon (2015). In 2018, Fabrice Hyber delivered the painted decoration for the glass roof of the Parisian palace Lutetia. He also produced "Les Deux Chênes" for Beaupassage from the double molding of a three-hundred-year-old tree from the Vendée valley. [5]
Officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters since January 2012, Fabrice Hyber was elected to the Fine Arts Academy in 2018.
In 2021, Fabrice Hyber became ambassador of the “ONF-Agir pour la forêt” fund (National Forests Office (France)). [6]
On March 7, 2022, Fabrice Hyber was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center National des Arts Plastiques (France) by order of the Minister of Culture. [7]
Works
A prolific artist, Fabrice Hyber has built a portfolio made up of paintings, charcoal drawings, collages, and videos.
Hybert has suggested that his work explores ‘the enormous reservoir of the possible’ (Eyestorm 2007) via a deconstruction of language and communication. To this end, he deploys a very wide range of media for the purpose of expanding the range of his creative practice, deconstructing language in order to present the viewer with puzzles. He abjures the coherent, instantly understandable, text and the consistent oeuvre in favour of a proliferation that reflects the fundamentally nonlinear character of cognition. This is art in the tradition of the Surrealist object and stream of consciousness. It is more akin to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake than it is to classic narrative, it is Dionysian rather than Apollonian.
On the other hand, some of his projects look like exercises in visual language, his square football is not especially bewildering. It is quite simply a functional object that is turned into an ideal form (the cube). His idealised, cubed football maps onto the horror of function that characterises post-Duchampian fine art that rose into dominance in the international art world in the 1960s. Fabrice refers to such functionless objects as Prototypes d'objects en fonctionnement (prototypes of working objects), or POF. Another instance of connecting the previously unconnected (cf. Simon Starling) is Hyber's Swing (POF No 3), 1990. This is a playground swing with the addition of ‘two phallic protuberances on the seat, one hard, one soft’ (Eyestorm 2007).
Another work Roof-Ceiling (POF No 10), 1995, consists of a mechanical device which vacuums up the rubbish in a room and deposits it in a transparent ceiling overhead. Installed in a hairdressing salon, it allows the viewer's newly sheared locks to become part of the architecture (Eyestorm 2007). This work is not only a demonstration of creative cognition, it is also a valuable excursion of fine art outside the museum and into everyday life. Hyber is one of the artists that Nicolas Bourriaud included in his account of relational art which is to say art that engages with people and everyday life (Bourriaud 2002).
Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997, [8] he created a multifaceted work from the practice of painting. As an artist in dialogue, he has collaborated with companies, [9] launched the Organoide program at the Institut Pasteur, [10] and since 2012 has been developing the production network "the directors". [11]
Art and sciences
Sensitive to biology, astronomy or even mathematics and physics, Fabrice Hyber transposes scientific questions into his work. He does so by treating subjects and by exposing the creative process, like research tables. [12] The Homeopathic Paintings highlight the body, the landscape, or the object, echoing the act of creation which is explained from beginning to end. Thus, calculations, research documents, sketches, or the artist's moods are constitutive of each work as much as they are the visible matrix. [13]
Fabrice Hybert seeks to work with the scientific community. In 2007, he collaborated with the American biotechnologist Robert S. Langer on the issue of stem cells, [14] or with the Institut Pasteur and Professor Olivier Schwartz. [15] Often present in Fabrice Hyber's work are viral notions brought up by the artist during the COVID-19 crisis. [16]
The reality of environmental issues is also salient in his work. Sowing trees in his Vendée valley, he devotes part of his work to researching ecosystems in several parts of the world. The place of renewable energies and electrical uses is also at the heart of its thinking. [17]
In 2022 and 2023, the exhibitions presented at the Cartier Foundation and at the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire illustrate the environmental issues that Hyber questions in his work. [18] At the Cartier Foundation, transmission is also played out as a process of environmental education through the establishment of a school with a cycle of courses and conferences within the system. [19]
Art and business
As an artist and entrepreneur, Fabrice Hyber established partnerships with companies from the start of his career. When he created the Square Meter of lipstick in 1981, he developed a project with the cosmetics manufacturer Liliane France. Since then, he has increased collaborations with private companies. [20]
Emblematic of this work, he created the largest soap in the world in 1991. Together with the Compagnie des Détergents et du Savon de Marseille, he produced a 22-ton soap approved by Guinness Records. An artistic, performative, and industrial object, the biggest soap in the world is also a commercial act in partnership with the Édouard Leclerc group and Location-Véhicule France transport. It was displayed in supermarket car parks throughout France and then in Belgium, Germany, and Spain. [21] Mentioned in the book 1-1 = 2, trade is important for Fabrice Hyber, especially in that it is to be considered as a means of exchange and not just as a strictly economic element. [22]
Wishing to forge partnerships with private companies while maintaining a form of independence in his projects, their productions and their distributions, Fabrice Hyber founded the SARL UR: Unlimited Responsibility in 1994. Used by Fabrice Hyber, the SARL UR is also open to other creators. [12] So little present, at that time, in artistic circles, the entrepreneurial question is seen there as the object of encounters and experiments as much as of production. Taking up the trade codes (promotion, communication, sale), and in particular by marketing POFs, one of UR's objectives is to fund artistic projects. [21]
In 1995, the Musée d'Art moderne de Paris presented the Hybertmarché exhibition in collaboration with the University of Lünebourg. Involving the UR company, the project consists of an inventory of objects present in Hyber's work by ordering, sending, receiving shelving for the public, selling, and modifying them according to Hyber's visions. [23]
Among other projects in partnership with companies, Fabrice Hyber collaborated with Conquérant Spirits to help develop the Frisson d'Hyber gin in 2021. [24]
In March 2022, he collaborated with luxury leather goods designer Camille Fournet to create a limited and numbered edition capsule of products using his hyper green. [25]
Selection of projects
The POFs
Born in 1991, POFs (Prototypes of in-operation objects) are inspired by everyday life. Hybrid, absurd, subversive and yet very close to everyday objects, POFs start from reality and slide it towards the point where logical perception is undermined. Conceived as invitations to the appropriation and diversion of the ordinary, the POFs are initially marketed by UR and can be made by each person according to an indication given by Fabrice Hyber. By questioning his daily life or by fabricating, the viewer becomes a stakeholder in the work. The Endless Staircase, the Swing or the Square Balloon are among the most emblematic of the 160 POFs created since 1991.
In 2018, the Maison des POF was created as part of the percent for art for the new building of the Nantes Art School. A place of experimentation, the Maison des POF is an evolving firm that invites the public to manipulate, try and question themselves. [26]
L’Homme de Bessines
Responding to a public commission for the town of Bessines (Deux-Sèvres), [3] Fabrice Hyber dispersed six bronze men painted green in the village. At a height of 87 cm, half the size of the artist, each sculpture is pierced by eleven holes from which jets of water shoot out. In connection with the notion of mutation treated by the artist in 1986, L'Homme de Bessines is also a viral work because it is intended to be distributed indefinitely. Thus, since the first installation in Bessines in 1991, the sculpture has been reproduced in several hundred copies, of varying sizes and appearances, all over the planet. In 2022, they were installed in the gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris for the thirtieth anniversary of the Homme de Bessines.
Eau d’or, eau dort, Odor and Spiral TV
Invited to use the French pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997, Fabrice Hyber transformed space into a place of creation and permanent change and not into a place of presentation of works of art. Named Eau d'Or, Eau Dort, Odor, the event transformed the French pavilion into an experimental filming studio with the participation of various personalities (Albert Jacquard, Jean Rouch, Uri Tzaig, made in Eric, etc.) and the public. Live or recorded, the programs copied and transgressed television codes while placing the question of the body at the center of the project. For Fabrice Hyber, the creation process is then more important than the final product. The project earned the artist a Golden Lion award. [27] [28] [29]
In 1999, it was at the Wacoal Art Center in Tokyo that Fabrice Hyber developed a proposal according to the Venetian device. Through Spiral TV, the artist produced and broadcast live (on cable and internet) twelve hours of daily programs under the name "It's Tomorrow Now", for five days.
Inconnu.net
From September to November 2000, Fabrice Hybert invests the Arc de Triomphe and its surroundings as part of a national demonstration confident seven national monuments to seven artists. Wishing to create a green setting around the monument, Fabrice Hyber deployed a belt of a hundred birch trees in opposition to the mineral character of the place. Changing green lighting was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe while an historical room was dedicated to viewing the inconnu.net website. [30] [31]
Developing the question born from the commemorative tomb of the First World War, Fabrice Hyber transformed the Parisian monument into an open door to the unknown, both through the external device and through the internet portal which invited visitors to ask questions and answer other questions arising from contributions from artists, writers, scientists, etc.
L'Artère, le jardin des dessins
In 2001, to mark the 20th anniversary of the appearance of AIDS, the Sidaction association launched a call for projects for the creation of a commemorative monument. Detached from the aesthetic of commemoration, Fabrice Hyber's project reflected the social, emotional or medical aspects linked to the virus. Spanning 1001 m2, the ensemble is made up of ceramics designed by the artist and produced in Monterrey, Mexico. Produced from 2002 to 2006, the work installed in the Parc de la Villette resembles, by its rhizomatic aspect, a vast storyboard. [32]
Le Cri, L'Écrit
“The cry is mark of the slavery abolition but also a warning against modern slavery. The cry is fear, tears but also joy. The cry is a metaphor for this enslavement which has been abolished by the texts. The cry is a drawing in space; for the garden in front of the Senate, a writing was needed! The abolition of slavery is the open chain ring, the closed ring is that everything can start again, and the base is the return to the roots, but it is also the Earth which is an hindering... " [33]
Announced in 2006 by President Chirac, the commission for a public work dedicated to the abolition of slavery was entrusted to Fabrice Hyber. Inaugurated in 2007, the 3.7m high polychrome bronze sculpture represents three chain rings held vertically by golden wedges representing French institutions and the fragility of a situation that can tip over. Dark, one of the faces of the sculpture presents the words "Elsewhere", "Decimated", "Exterminated", "Deported", "Death", "Inhuman", "Slave". The other side reveals a blood system attached to the living. [34]
C’Hyber(t) Rallies
Eager to see art out of museums and centers dedicated, Fabrice Hybert developed the first Hyber(t) Rally in Tokyo in 2001, the same year he also exhibited at Watari Hum. Developed since in Vassivière, Paris, Reunion island, Toulon, etc., the device invites spectators to take part in a vast treasure hunt intended to find POFs hidden in everyday spaces. [35]
Adapted to their territory of performance, the C’Hyber(t) Rallies also have the objective of revealing landscapes or human constructions. The search for a work of art outside its traditional location serves as a medium between the place and the people within. [36]
