Fabrice Hybert, also known by the pseudonym Fabrice Hyber, is a French plasticartist born on 12 July 1961 in Luçon (Vendée). At 56, he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts on April 25, 2018.
Attached to nature, economics, commerce and science, he has created systems around artistic production with companies, scientists and laboratories around the world. Renowned artist, he works in many diverse ways - accumulating, proliferating, hybridizating - sliding between painting, sculpture, installation and video.
Fabrice Hyber drawing in his workshop in 2022L'Homme de Bessines in the gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris (2022).
Biography
After a childhood in Vendée, Fabrice Hyber studied mathematics and physics. From 1979 to 1985, he was trained at the Nantes School of Arts. In 1981, he produced his first painting, the Square meter of lipstick, and exhibited in 1984 at the International Drawing Biennial of Saint-Étienne and in 1986 during the International Workshops of the Pays de la Loire at the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud. That same year, he presented his first personal exhibition, "Mutation", at Nantes.[1]
Since 1986, he presents personal exhibitions in Montreal, Limoges, Poitiers, Strasbourg, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Zurich, Bruges, Sète or Guadalajara.
In 2000 he was entrusted with a project on the Arc de Triomphe. In 2001, Sidaction commissioned him for a monumental work, L'Artère , installed in the Parc de la Villette and to which he devoted himself from 2002 to 2006. In 2004, Fabrice Hyber announce: “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, it was in the Jardin du Luxembourg that he installs The Scream, the Written , a public commission commemorating the abolition of slavery.[3] At the same time, he continues a process launched around 1990 by sowing trees in his childhood valley.[4]
Developing his experiments and artistic works, Fabrice Hyber sets up a sculpture garden in Japan, another in Texas. He also collaborates with the architectural firm Jakob + MacFarlane for 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, for Beaupassage, "Les Deux Chênes" from the double molding of a three-hundred-years-old tree from its 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 becomes 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 gradually builds a production made up of paintings, charcoal drawings, collages, videos, etc.
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 ironically 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 so-called relational art which is to say art that engages with people and everyday life (Bourriaud 2002). He also writes.
Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1997,[8] he created a multifaceted work from the practice of painting. 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 the scientific question into his work, both through the subjects treated and by exposing the creative process, like research tables.[12] The Homeopathic Paintings by Fabrice Hyber 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 they are the visible matrix.[13]
Fabrice Hybert seeks to work with the scientific community. In 2007, for example, he collaborated with the American biotechnologist Robert S. Langer on the issue of stem cells,[14] or, regularly, with the Institut Pasteur and the Professor Olivier Schwartz.[15] Often present in Fabrice Hyber's work, viral notions are also bring up by the artist during the COVID-19 crisis.[16]
The reality of environmental issues is also salient in the work of Fabrice Hyber. 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 Fabrice Hyber questions in his work.[18] At the Cartier Foundation, transmission is also played out in 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
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, the largest soap in the world was created in 1991. With the Compagnie des Détergents et du Savon de Marseille, it produced a 22-tons molded soap approved by Guinness Records. An artistic, performative and industrial object, the Biggest soap in the world is also a commercial act insofar as, in partnership with the Édouard Leclerc group and LOcation-VEhicule France transport, it travels 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 and to maintain a form of independence in his projects, their production and their distribution, 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), in particular by marketing POFs, one of UR's objectives is the funding of 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: having an inventory of objects present in Hyber's work, ordering or sending them, receiving them and placing them on the shelf publicly after the opening of the exhibition, modifying them according to what they are in his mind, putting them on sale.[23]
Among other projects in partnership with companies, Fabrice Hyber is helping to develop the Frisson d'Hyber gin in 2021 with the company Conquérant Spirits.[24]
In March 2022, he collaborated with luxury leather goods designer Camille Fournet and created a limited and numbered edition capsule of products using his Hyber 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 undertakes to disperse 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 reproduice in several hundred copies, of varying sizes and appearances, all over the planet. In 2022, the thirtieth anniversary of the Homme de Bessines is the occasion for an installation in the gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris.
Eau d’or, eau dort, Odor and Spiral TV
Invited to use the French pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997, Fabrice Hyber transforms space into a place of creation in permanent change and not into a place of presentation of works of art. Named Eau d'Or, Eau Dort, Odor, the event transforms 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 transgress 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. Noticed, the project earned the artist the award of a Golden Lion.[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 produces and broadcasts 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 deploys a belt of a hundred birch trees in opposition to the mineral character of the place. Changing green lighting is projected onto the Arc de Triomphe while an historical room is dedicated to viewing the inconnu.net website.[30][31]
Developing the question born from the commemorative tomb of the First World War, Fabrice Hyber transforms the Parisian monument into an open door to the unknown, both through the external device and through the internet portal which invites visitors to ask questions including answers other questions arising from contributions from artists, writers, scientists, etc.
L'Artère, le jardin des dessins
L'Artère
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 reflects 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
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 It develops its 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]
Eros, c'est la vie, Le Confort moderne, Poitiers, France
Chambre 763, Carlton Palace, Paris, France
1994
This is the show and the show is many things, Museum van Hedendaagse kunst, Ghent, Belgium
Hors-limites, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Cloaca maxima, Museum der Stadtenwässerung, Zurich, Switzerland
1995
Take me I'm yours, Serpentine Gallery, London, England
Shift, De Appel, Amsterdam, Nederland
Maisons-cerveaux, FRAC Champagne Ardenne, Reims, France
Le Dépeupleur, Froment Putman Gallery, Paris, France
Laboratoires, Damien Hirst, Fabrice Hybert, Kiki Smith, Patrick Van Caeckenberg, pour une expérience du corps, Art et Essai Gallery (Rennes 2 University), Rennes, France
Féminin Masculin le sexe de l'art, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France
Biennale de Kwangju, Kwangju, South Corea
1996
We (Fabrice Hybert et Uri Tzaig), musée d'Israël, Jérusalem, Israël
Collection : Absalon, Hyber, Mouillé, CAPC-Contemporary Art Museum, Bordeaux, France
Cabines de bain, La Motta swimming pool, Fribourg, Switzerland
1997
Kunst in der stadt, Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria
Fenêtre sur cour, Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France
Do it, New-York, USA
Connexions implicites, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris, France
Tu parles/J'écoute, Fine arts museum, Taipei, Taïwan
To the living room, Watari-um museum, Tokyo, Japan
Premises, Guggenheim, New-York, USA
Métissages, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, France
Jef Geys-Fabrice Hybert, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium
Indoor, Centro civico La Grancia, Rapolano, Italy
H2O, Erna Hécey Gallery, Luxembourg
Cet et été là... Exposition des variétés, CRAC, Sète, France
1999
Spiral TV it's tomorrow now (3e édition du festival art life), Spiral, Tokyo, Japan
Picnic, Museo de las artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Passage, new french art, Hiroshima - MOCA / Sapporo - Hokkaido museum of modern art / Tokyo - Setagaya museum, Japan
Made in France, Artsonje center, Séoul, South Corea
Indoor, musée des beaux-arts, Lyon, France
2000
Voilà le monde dans la tête, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France
Passage, new french art, City museum, Nagoya, Japan
Narcisse blessé, autoportraits contemporains, Passage de Retz, Paris, France
La Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire, Villa Médicis, Rome, Italy
Air air, celebrating inflatables, Grimaldi forum, Monaco
2001
Somewhere over the rainbow, FRAC Normzndie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, France
Simulacres et Détournements dans les années 1980 et 90, CAPC-Contemporary Art Museum, Bordeaux, France
Le Ludique, Québec's Museum, Québec, Canada
2002
Objets de réflexion, FRAC Ile-de-France / Le plateau, Paris, France
2003
Trésors publics 20 ans de création dans les Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain. L'État des choses. L'Objet dans l'art de 1960 à aujourd'hui, Fine arts museum, Nantes, France
Sexe, sexe, etc., Galerie Beaubourg, Château Notre-dame-des-Fleurs, France
Pour l'amour de Vénus, Donjon de Vez, France
Les 20 ans des FRAC, Fine arts museum, Nantes, France
Le Ludique, Modern Art Museum, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, France
2004
Mix Max, Artsonje center, Séoul, South Korea
L'Art à la plage, Ramatuelle, France
Frantisek Kupka, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France
F2004@Shanghai, Année de la France en Chine, La Fabrique, Shanghai[52]
2005
Supernova, Domaine Pommery, Reims, France
Météo, Villa Arson, Nice, France
Dionysiac, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
3rd world ceramix biennale, Incheon, South Corea
2006
We Humans are Free : from the collection of SMAK, The 21st century museum of contemporary art, Kanazawa, Japan
Une proposition de Mathieu Mercier, FRAC Basse-Normandie, Caen, France
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