Jan Fabre's Glass and Bone Works at San Gregorio Abbey in Venice

Jan Fabre's exhibition at the Abbey of San Gregorio in Venice presents forty works from the 1970s to the present, centered on a Murano glass dung beetle topped with a laurel plant. The show explores themes of metamorphosis, death, and regeneration through glass and bone. Blue doves and flying rats line the shelves. Highlights include 'The Catacombs of the Dead Street Dogs' (2009-2017), a Congo canoe made of thousands of bone lamellae with glass oars, and 'The Pacifier', a glass and bone pacifier never before exhibited, inspired by a Beuys show. The exhibition juxtaposes Flemish painting traditions (using ground animal bones as pigment) with Fabre's childhood fascination with glass as an alchemical medium. Works include catacomb altars displaying a vagina and penis, blue skulls, a cemetery of abandoned dogs, skulls with small animal skeletons, spectral monks made from animal and human bones, egg-globes invaded by spermatozoa, a cross with glass decorations and a snake skeleton referencing Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights', and spheres and turtles on the floor. The artist positions himself as a mediator between the material and celestial worlds, using the fragility and sharpness of glass and bone to evoke the passage of time and the precariousness of existence.