Born in Turin in 1936 and raised in Friuli before moving to Milan in the late 1950s, Luciano Fabro holds a central place in the history of art in the second half of the twentieth century. A leading figure in post-war Italian art, his name became inseparably associated with Arte Povera, yet he always maintained an independent, rigorous approach to artistic exploration that resisted conformity.

Over the years, Fabro developed a distinctive practice grounded in an ongoing dialogue between matter, language, perception and thought. From the outset, he pursued his own investigation into the concept of inhabiting space, understood as a dynamic field of action, while exploring the act of looking, the viewer’s experience and their direct relationship with the artwork and its surroundings. For Fabro, painting becomes vision and sculpture revelation: a means not of representing the world but of revealing it, opening up new possibilities of interpretation through the direct experience of space. His sculptures bring together widely differing materials, from traditional ones such as marble, glass and bronze to less conventional or fragile materials such as silk, lead and mirrors, each chosen for its sensory and evocative qualities. Walking through the vast Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca, this variety becomes palpable.

Alongside his artistic work, Fabro was also a rigorous theorist, complementing his practice with an extensive body of writings and critical contributions. Having moved to Milan—where he supported himself through a succession of jobs in the early 1960s—he went on, between the late 1970s and early 1980s, to help establish Casa degli Artisti with Hidetoshi Nagasawa and Jole De Sanna, transforming it into a laboratory for dialogue and experimentation open to younger generations. From 1983 to 2002, he taught at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, shaping and inspiring generations of artists: many still remember his invariably packed lectures and his generosity towards young people.

More than a decade after his last international exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, we finally celebrate Fabro with the first museum retrospective dedicated to him in Italy: the exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca brings together around 50 works, including sculptures and installations, tracing the full span of the artist’s creative practice, from his earliest experiments to his mature work. At the heart of the exhibition is the concept of habitat, a notion that runs through Fabro’s practice from the 1960s onwards and becomes explicit in subsequent decades: the habitat evokes a dual etymological connection between the verb habito, meaning to inhabit a particular place, and the noun habitus, understood as form and outward appearance. From this perspective, the habitat becomes a space to move through, a place capable of guiding our gaze, changing our perception and reshaping our ability to build relationships. 

The vast Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca thus provide the ideal setting for this vision, alternating individual works with large-scale environments in which several pieces coexist within a single space. Alongside Fabro’s celebrated experiments with reflective surfaces from the 1960s, the exhibition traces the subsequent developments of his practice through to his expansive paper habitats, some of which have been reconstructed specifically for the exhibition, following the plans and instructions left by the artist.

We recommend picking up the guide prepared by the museum and letting it lead you through the exhibition, taking the time that Luciano Fabro’s refined art deserves.