Mucciaccia Gallery is pleased to announce Jan Fabre: The Artist as a Street Dog, a new installation and one-night-only performance by renowned Belgian artist Jan Fabre (b. 1958).The performance will take place throughout the opening reception on Saturday 31 May from 6 to 8 pm, with the exhibition opening to the public on Monday 2 June 2025.
In this new work, Fabre returns to a recurring and emblematic figure in his oeuvre: the stray dog—a symbol of resilience, marginality, and defiance. Referencing earlier works such as Me as an Aggressive German Sheepdog (with Blue Tongue) (1979), My Movements Are Alone Like Streetdogs (2004), The Carnival of the Dead Streetdogs (2006), and The Catacombs of the Dead Street Dogs (2009) Fabre once again inhabits the position of the outsider to examine themes of artistic survival, the body as a site of ritual and resistance, and the uneasy convergence of festivity and decline.
For over four decades, Jan Fabre has stood as one of Europe’s most visionary and influential artists. His versatile output—encompassing performance, sculpture, theatre, drawing, and writing—challenges the limits of the body and ritual, confronting mortality, ecstasy, and the blurred threshold between art and life. Deeply rooted in the Flemish baroque and carnivalesque traditions, his work fuses visual excess with symbolic rigour, producing a practice that is both confrontational and poetic.
The figure of the stray dog emerges from Fabre’s early memories in Antwerp, where abandoned canines became potent symbols of societal neglect. In this new iteration, the dog is not merely depicted but embodied. Fabre becomes the dog—not as theatrical role, but as ontological state. The artist is the dog: fiercely loyal and devoted to its truth, yet unpredictable and untamed—guided by instinct rather than convention. With his tongue painted blue in Bic ink—a gesture first introduced in Ilad of the Bic Art (1981), where he symbolically transitioned from street dog to pedigree artist—Fabre reactivates a personal mythology that speaks to his complex relationship with artistic legitimacy.
Installed within a post-carnivalesque landscape of bones, butter, and party debris, The Artist as a Street Dog echoes the vanitas tradition in its evocation of time, decay, and transience. Here, celebration and abjection coexist uneasily, and excess becomes residue. The Artist as a Street Dog is not a nostalgic reprise but a radical reinvention. It continues Fabre’s enduring exploration of corporeal endurance and symbolic resistance. In an age that prizes conformity, disposability, and moral certainty, Fabre reasserts the role of the artist as reformer, jester, and stray—continuously creating, continuously performing.
MUCCIACCIA GALLERY, London
21 Dering Street, London W1S 1AL, United Kingdom
https://mucciaccia.com/en/jan-fabre-the-artist-as-a-street-dog/
