Fabrice Hyber
28 Sep 2012 - 07 Jan 2013
FABRICE HYBER
Raw Materials
28 September 2012 - 7 January 2013
“The exhibition is constructed as a mental landscape. It is organized round a certain number of modules. Visitors will be able to test POFs (prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement - prototypes of working objects) and objects or experience situations. In this “campsite of works” where artifice replaces nature and nature is controlled, encircled, the outside brushes against the inside.” F. Hyber
The Palais de Tokyo welcomes Fabrice Hyber (b. 1961), one of the most inventive and influential artists of his generation. Attracted by our new spaces, Fabrice Hyber takes them over to create “a reformatting place, with two ways in: one active, the other contemplative”. Thanks to an overhanging environment making it possible to put old and new works into perspective, the artist reorganizes the parameters of the world. These novel constructions, in a way illustrations of deconstructed logic, thus cause new habits to appear; it only takes a square football or the change in scale of a raw material to shift our standpoint. Thus from an exploded and imploded world Fabrice Hyber recomposes a new universe, through prototypes and drawings, the raw material of that world.
The exhibition when active is designed as a living organism that parasitically takes space over, inviting viewers to behave differently. When passive, it becomes a paradoxical landscape.
That footbridge, that imaginary line that links the works to one another, is also a real crossing of time. As they make their way, viewers are invited to superimpose – in accordance with a bird’s eye view, and above all a retrospective view – the past on to the present, memory on to recollection, the work on to its resurgences, so elaborating new forms of stories, new systems of interpretation.
ÉCREATIVE ENERGY
Enthralled by the concepts of rhizome and proliferation as well as transformation, Fabrice Hyber tries to convey a thought in the process of being born. Thus a creative energy that comes from movement, displacement, and slippage, or even drifting, emanates from this protean work – at the frontiers of drawing, photography, video, sculpture, painting, and performance. Since the start of his career in the 1980s he has created hybrid works made from different materials and mediums, based on a network of unexpected derivations and associations. Drawings, photographs and objects pile up and contaminate one another, transforming the pictorial space into a mental figure, the expression of work inside the artist’s head. These homeopathic paintings, a story-board with many entries, demonstrate the effervescence and dynamism of the artist’s thinking. “More complex than a film about my works, story-boards have become crucial for describing all the ramifications of my thinking. To be absorbed in small doses, the title seemed obvious to me: homeopathic painting.” F. Hyber
THE CONCEPT AT WORK
“I give objects so that people can change the ways they behave. Forms must not be closed as they are in design with its obsession with function. The POFs (prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement) are forms of openness. Everything can be transformed on balancing exercises to be redefined on a permanent basis.” F. Hyber “A mental prosthesis that extends thought via the body” or “an undertaking linking up individuals, ideas and skills”: Fabrice Hyber plays with the intersection of disciplines and references to open up the artistic imagination to new universes. In 1991 he created his first POFs, “prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement” [prototypes of working objects], by shifting the original function of a large number of familiar objects, found in everyday life. This displacement induces and generates new ways of behaving among the public who are invited to “test” them in the exhibitions staged by Hyber.
The place for the incubation of new forms and attitudes
“It is at the center of activity that artistic intervention is most effective. Every place has increasingly specific functions that can become something different, very quickly! It is the artist’s role to report on this.” F. Hyber Far from confining himself to a fixed visual code, he tries out a multiplicity of writings and supports which are each time the place for the incubation of new forms and attitudes. Thus he makes the world of art and that of business or scientific research rub shoulders in order to transform behaviors and bring together seemingly opposed territories. In 1994, he created UR (Unlimited Responsibility), SARL [Co. Ltd.] intended to promote the production and exchanges of projects between artists and businesses. His objective was to upgrade the profiles of producers, cross various territories and bring them closer together, and above all to act, to do. In 1995 he converted the spaces at the Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris into a vast sales warehouse, Hybermarché [Hybermarket], and in 1996 installed a professional hairdressing salon at the Pompidou Center for the exhibition Féminimasculin.
A FEW KEY WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
La Maison des vents, 2012
In a world where air-conditioned living is omnipresent, the house of winds makes that air-conditioning consistent through one of its components: wind. Immediately a visitor opens the door of the cabin, he unleashes a storm of stifling winds: the Ile d’Yeu on a stormy day... Here the winds are partitioned off, as we would no doubt like them to be. Have we dreamed too much that it should be fine all the time, to the point where the planet is warming up?
Le Mur escalier, 2012
As an extension of the endless staircase (Prototype d’Objets en Fonctionnement no. 100), the staircase here is joined to a floor and a wall that have the same dimensions: by moving, visitors cause the floor to tip into a wall and the wall into a floor. They make the house move forward, they create a new situation, between a boat and a fun park, and their body becomes a balancing element.
Sol éponge, 2012
An exaggerated soil where the usual ingredients are disproportionate, composed of layers of sponge, this space highlights the humidity and porosity of the ground, not making it easy to walk: This was not the aim, but the consequence which showed up later. This space was invented in 1996 beside the Dead Sea at Jerusalem Museum: A drawing depicted the sea absorbed by the sponges. The consequences: The proportion of salt rises and the level of the water goes down, putting our bodies into different pressure situations. The POFs draw us towards new situations.
Terrain de jeu pour ballon carré, 2012
To coincide with the Football World Cup in 1998, Fabrice Hyber created the square ball. During the exhibitions where this POF was tested, new rules were developed: The players had to put the square ball by hand into one of the corners of a room that was also square. The public stood in the center of the ground, raised by a pyramidshaped platform. When the stadium was in operation, an inversion of the form of the traditional stadium where we look at the play from the world was unveiled. Here the world is around the public. Sensory and virtual reality are then mixed.
Mètre carré de rouge à lèvres, 1981
To make this monochrome Fabrice Hyber covered a 1-sq. m. surface with lipstick. This piece arose from his interest in František Kupka’s Baiser n°2 and was carried out while he was still a student; it sketches out the scope of the spheres that will be called on throughout his work. Here the artist plays with the porosity between the artistic, entrepreneurial and scientific fields by associating himself with a cosmetics factory and using the square meter as a unit of measurement for the canvas.
POF 3, La Balançoire, 1991
Fabrice Hyber’s swings come into the category of POFs. Of various sizes, colors and materials, they have flexible and rigid protuberances. Like all the POFs, the swing offers the possibility of multiple, undefined uses. Leaving visitors free to test these products for every conceivable use or to contemplate them, the artist plays with the status of the art object and upsets our habits and behavior.
MIT-Man, 2007
This sculpture is the outcome of the collaboration between Fabrice Hyber and Robert Langer, a professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), in 2006. Their activities, artistic et scientific respectively, converged during their exchanges relating to the question of the influence of the environment on the stem cells of the human body. MIT-Man, composed of fruit, vegetables and seeds, presents the foods of plant origin that promote the development of cells.
Raw Materials
28 September 2012 - 7 January 2013
“The exhibition is constructed as a mental landscape. It is organized round a certain number of modules. Visitors will be able to test POFs (prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement - prototypes of working objects) and objects or experience situations. In this “campsite of works” where artifice replaces nature and nature is controlled, encircled, the outside brushes against the inside.” F. Hyber
The Palais de Tokyo welcomes Fabrice Hyber (b. 1961), one of the most inventive and influential artists of his generation. Attracted by our new spaces, Fabrice Hyber takes them over to create “a reformatting place, with two ways in: one active, the other contemplative”. Thanks to an overhanging environment making it possible to put old and new works into perspective, the artist reorganizes the parameters of the world. These novel constructions, in a way illustrations of deconstructed logic, thus cause new habits to appear; it only takes a square football or the change in scale of a raw material to shift our standpoint. Thus from an exploded and imploded world Fabrice Hyber recomposes a new universe, through prototypes and drawings, the raw material of that world.
The exhibition when active is designed as a living organism that parasitically takes space over, inviting viewers to behave differently. When passive, it becomes a paradoxical landscape.
That footbridge, that imaginary line that links the works to one another, is also a real crossing of time. As they make their way, viewers are invited to superimpose – in accordance with a bird’s eye view, and above all a retrospective view – the past on to the present, memory on to recollection, the work on to its resurgences, so elaborating new forms of stories, new systems of interpretation.
ÉCREATIVE ENERGY
Enthralled by the concepts of rhizome and proliferation as well as transformation, Fabrice Hyber tries to convey a thought in the process of being born. Thus a creative energy that comes from movement, displacement, and slippage, or even drifting, emanates from this protean work – at the frontiers of drawing, photography, video, sculpture, painting, and performance. Since the start of his career in the 1980s he has created hybrid works made from different materials and mediums, based on a network of unexpected derivations and associations. Drawings, photographs and objects pile up and contaminate one another, transforming the pictorial space into a mental figure, the expression of work inside the artist’s head. These homeopathic paintings, a story-board with many entries, demonstrate the effervescence and dynamism of the artist’s thinking. “More complex than a film about my works, story-boards have become crucial for describing all the ramifications of my thinking. To be absorbed in small doses, the title seemed obvious to me: homeopathic painting.” F. Hyber
THE CONCEPT AT WORK
“I give objects so that people can change the ways they behave. Forms must not be closed as they are in design with its obsession with function. The POFs (prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement) are forms of openness. Everything can be transformed on balancing exercises to be redefined on a permanent basis.” F. Hyber “A mental prosthesis that extends thought via the body” or “an undertaking linking up individuals, ideas and skills”: Fabrice Hyber plays with the intersection of disciplines and references to open up the artistic imagination to new universes. In 1991 he created his first POFs, “prototypes d’objets en fonctionnement” [prototypes of working objects], by shifting the original function of a large number of familiar objects, found in everyday life. This displacement induces and generates new ways of behaving among the public who are invited to “test” them in the exhibitions staged by Hyber.
The place for the incubation of new forms and attitudes
“It is at the center of activity that artistic intervention is most effective. Every place has increasingly specific functions that can become something different, very quickly! It is the artist’s role to report on this.” F. Hyber Far from confining himself to a fixed visual code, he tries out a multiplicity of writings and supports which are each time the place for the incubation of new forms and attitudes. Thus he makes the world of art and that of business or scientific research rub shoulders in order to transform behaviors and bring together seemingly opposed territories. In 1994, he created UR (Unlimited Responsibility), SARL [Co. Ltd.] intended to promote the production and exchanges of projects between artists and businesses. His objective was to upgrade the profiles of producers, cross various territories and bring them closer together, and above all to act, to do. In 1995 he converted the spaces at the Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris into a vast sales warehouse, Hybermarché [Hybermarket], and in 1996 installed a professional hairdressing salon at the Pompidou Center for the exhibition Féminimasculin.
A FEW KEY WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
La Maison des vents, 2012
In a world where air-conditioned living is omnipresent, the house of winds makes that air-conditioning consistent through one of its components: wind. Immediately a visitor opens the door of the cabin, he unleashes a storm of stifling winds: the Ile d’Yeu on a stormy day... Here the winds are partitioned off, as we would no doubt like them to be. Have we dreamed too much that it should be fine all the time, to the point where the planet is warming up?
Le Mur escalier, 2012
As an extension of the endless staircase (Prototype d’Objets en Fonctionnement no. 100), the staircase here is joined to a floor and a wall that have the same dimensions: by moving, visitors cause the floor to tip into a wall and the wall into a floor. They make the house move forward, they create a new situation, between a boat and a fun park, and their body becomes a balancing element.
Sol éponge, 2012
An exaggerated soil where the usual ingredients are disproportionate, composed of layers of sponge, this space highlights the humidity and porosity of the ground, not making it easy to walk: This was not the aim, but the consequence which showed up later. This space was invented in 1996 beside the Dead Sea at Jerusalem Museum: A drawing depicted the sea absorbed by the sponges. The consequences: The proportion of salt rises and the level of the water goes down, putting our bodies into different pressure situations. The POFs draw us towards new situations.
Terrain de jeu pour ballon carré, 2012
To coincide with the Football World Cup in 1998, Fabrice Hyber created the square ball. During the exhibitions where this POF was tested, new rules were developed: The players had to put the square ball by hand into one of the corners of a room that was also square. The public stood in the center of the ground, raised by a pyramidshaped platform. When the stadium was in operation, an inversion of the form of the traditional stadium where we look at the play from the world was unveiled. Here the world is around the public. Sensory and virtual reality are then mixed.
Mètre carré de rouge à lèvres, 1981
To make this monochrome Fabrice Hyber covered a 1-sq. m. surface with lipstick. This piece arose from his interest in František Kupka’s Baiser n°2 and was carried out while he was still a student; it sketches out the scope of the spheres that will be called on throughout his work. Here the artist plays with the porosity between the artistic, entrepreneurial and scientific fields by associating himself with a cosmetics factory and using the square meter as a unit of measurement for the canvas.
POF 3, La Balançoire, 1991
Fabrice Hyber’s swings come into the category of POFs. Of various sizes, colors and materials, they have flexible and rigid protuberances. Like all the POFs, the swing offers the possibility of multiple, undefined uses. Leaving visitors free to test these products for every conceivable use or to contemplate them, the artist plays with the status of the art object and upsets our habits and behavior.
MIT-Man, 2007
This sculpture is the outcome of the collaboration between Fabrice Hyber and Robert Langer, a professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), in 2006. Their activities, artistic et scientific respectively, converged during their exchanges relating to the question of the influence of the environment on the stem cells of the human body. MIT-Man, composed of fruit, vegetables and seeds, presents the foods of plant origin that promote the development of cells.