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Lot Essay
Fabro, what a great artist! Capable of creating excitement in you before a slab of shaped marble. We both fell in love immediately: the stylized figure of Fabro's nudes is simply magnificent. This one in pink marble has a kind of softness that makes it special, as though it were endowed with a life of its own. Right from the start we called it Nudo che scende le scale (Nude Descending a Staircase) in homage to Duchamp. Like most of Fabro's works, the sculpture comes into your home and "dictates" the rules to your space: it changes everything, in a certain sense, and you realise that it is the work that is asserting itself. With the valuable help of the Galleria Christian Stein, we built for "her" some iron steps (which we are donating to the work, because we don't have the courage to separate them), on which the pink marble revealed all its charm. In this way, the nude became the protagonist in a room hosting other works of Arte Povera.
A work that conveys great energy, but also a profound sense of beauty.
In Nudo (Nude) Luciano Fabro presents a languid human-scaled slab of flesh-coloured marble seemingly pouring itself down a row of steps. An extraordinarily simple, monolithic form, it belongs to a series of works on the Duchampian theme of ‘a Nude Descending a Staircase’ that Fabro made in 1988 and three of which he exhibited at the Pieroni Gallery in Rome that year. Demonstrating the artist’s extraordinary ability to articulate, with the simplest of materials, an uncanny and arcane beauty lying inherent within the material reality of the world, these three works, placing a single, human-sized slab of marble over a progression of steps placed in front of the open windows of the gallery transformed the entire exhibition space into a magical arena of mysterious potential and wonder.
Seeming to simultaneously both descend from the open exterior space outside the gallery window into the gallery and at the same time to point upwards towards the wider, open space beyond the confines of the gallery walls, Fabro’s Tre nudi che scendono le scale, were an extraordinarily poetic reinvention of using marble to sculpt both the human figure and the human experience of the world.
RB
A work that conveys great energy, but also a profound sense of beauty.
In Nudo (Nude) Luciano Fabro presents a languid human-scaled slab of flesh-coloured marble seemingly pouring itself down a row of steps. An extraordinarily simple, monolithic form, it belongs to a series of works on the Duchampian theme of ‘a Nude Descending a Staircase’ that Fabro made in 1988 and three of which he exhibited at the Pieroni Gallery in Rome that year. Demonstrating the artist’s extraordinary ability to articulate, with the simplest of materials, an uncanny and arcane beauty lying inherent within the material reality of the world, these three works, placing a single, human-sized slab of marble over a progression of steps placed in front of the open windows of the gallery transformed the entire exhibition space into a magical arena of mysterious potential and wonder.
Seeming to simultaneously both descend from the open exterior space outside the gallery window into the gallery and at the same time to point upwards towards the wider, open space beyond the confines of the gallery walls, Fabro’s Tre nudi che scendono le scale, were an extraordinarily poetic reinvention of using marble to sculpt both the human figure and the human experience of the world.
RB