From 8 June to 23 September 2007 GAMeC is "moving" to Venice with an extraordinary solo exhibition dedicated to Jan Fabre, set up in the rooms at the historic residence of Palazzo Benzon overlooking the Grand Canal. It presents the multifaceted research of Fabre, ranging from sculpture to films, drawings and installations. The exhibition is curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, who also curated the 2003 solo show of Fabre's films and drawings, Gaude Succurrere Vitae, at GAMeC in Bergamo and oversaw the publication of the monograph Homo Faber, with a complete collection of the artist's works from 1978 to 2006, published for the exhibition held in Antwerp in 2006.

Since the late Seventies, Jan Fabre has used a broad range of expressive languages that go from the plastic arts to film, theatre, choreography, dance, drawing and sculpture. In each of these multiple areas of expression, Fabre focuses his research on the body, understood as a physical reality and mental dimension. His art reflects human nature – necessarily fragile and mortal – and the desire each of us has to overcome this precariousness, through the subjects that are intrinsic to the Flemish tradition: madness, illness, death, the sweetness of sin, regeneration and spiritual power.

The human being, man's precariousness and frailty are central to Fabre's oeuvre, exalting the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth. He considers death the essence of living, the space of what is no longer alive and to which art restores life. Thus, for the artist the body is the highest representation of flow, of the cycle of life, and of what begins and ends only to begin again. Fabre often develops this concept of rebirth and of overcoming limitations through the images of insects that populate his imagination and work – particularly the beetle, the Egyptian symbol of the Sun god. With them, he expresses the eternal myth of transformation and regeneration in the world of nature and the human condition.

Therefore, the moments of passage – between the visible and invisible, day and night, life and death, immanence and transcendence – and the figures that represent and symbolise them are central to his oeuvre. With his work, Fabre explores life in all its expressions and forms.

Fabre's work merges the quintessential aspects of human creation: science, technology and art. He is like a scientist collecting the data determining the essence of his creation: technique gives it form, and the artistic expression that Fabre decides to use is the outcome. This solo show offers the public a look at this path and at the catharsis that is part of each living being.