Rops/Fabre: Facing Time

Over the course of the summer, Namur will become a meeting point for contemporary art as it welcomes Jan Fabre (born 1958), an artist-innovator, visual artist, man of the theatre, and author, who has been at the forefront of the international art scene for more than thirty-five years. After his being honoured at the Louvre in Paris (2008), the Kröller-Mu¨ller Museum in the Netherlands (2011), the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (2011), and the MAXXI in Rome (2012), Namur is excited to welcome this renowned artist for a new exhibition to be held in the city’s museums and streets. The spark for this monumental project came from a simple anecdote: an interview published in 2011 in which Jan Fabre stated that if he were to steal a work of art from a museum, it would be Félicien Rops’s Pornocratès. The notion of invitation quickly became the focus of the exhibitions since, in effect, Rops was inviting Fabre to his museum, to make connections, to focus on the similarities and differences that formed their artistic worlds.