Fabien VERSCHAERE, visual artist born in 1975 in Vincennes lives and works in Paris.
Graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2000 and from the Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2001.
After the Dena Foundation Award in 2000, his works were exhibited in France, notably at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris at three major events including the collective exhibition Notre histoire in 2006 and a personal exhibition at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2007. The exhibitions then increased abroad, Milan, Hong Kong, Newcastle, New York, Bucharest, Hanoi and Abu Dhabi.
In 2009, he participated in two important Paris collective exhibitions: Art 02 Force at the Grand Palais and Vraoum at La Maison Rouge. In 2010, he is present in the collective exhibition Fantasmagoria, the mythical world, at the Musée des Abattoirs de Toulouse and at the RX gallery in Paris in 2011 for a personal exhibition.
Several collaborations have then given birth to unique and exceptional pieces such as the baby football with customised leather with the designers Domeau & Perès, the sets made with the tabletaker Elie Bleu in Paris or the glass service designed with the CIAV, Centre International d'Art Verrier de Meisenthal.
In 2012, after a personal exhibition in Munich at the Traversée gallery, he participated in numerous collective exhibitions, including at the Maison des Arts de Malakoff or at the Réfectoire des Cordeliers in Paris. In 2013, an in situ creation commissioned by La RMN-Grand Palais was inaugurated in the D rotunda of the Grand Palais.
Numerous collective exhibitions took place in 2014: the exhibition "Le Mur" at La Maison Rouge in Paris, the exhibition "Portrait 1" at the RX gallery in Paris and the exhibition " Andreas et Fabien Verschaere" at the Huberty & Breyne gallery in Brussels.
A personal exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne Saint-Etienne Métropole was presented in 2014. A catalogue entitled "The Small Theater of Muxuland" was published.
A collaboration with Pierre Hermé was translated into an original project in the form of "Residences Itinérantes" from which were born drawings by Fabien Verschaere made in Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and Paris.
In 2015, he participated in a collective exhibition at the SEMA Museum in Seoul, Korea as part of the G-Dragon Project.
That same year, he received the order from Gecina of a monumental fresco in the 13th arrondissement of Paris as part of the label "1 Immeuble, 1 work" at the initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
In 2016, he exhibited at the GMOMA Museum in Seoul, Korea as part of the "G Live" exhibition.
In 2018, in Paris, he presented two personal exhibitions, an exhibition of drawings on paper at Valérie Delaunay Gallery and an exhibition of paintings at Brugier-Rigail Gallery.
Fabien Verschaere develops a singular work, a universe populated by hybrid creatures, monsters and chimeras from his unbridled imagination.
The self-portrait is his privileged theme and whatever the traits under which he stands – as a demonic angel, as a wink clown, or as a princess for fairy tales – Fabien Verschaere never makes a gift. It develops a universe that is both playful, strange and mysterious, populated by archetypal figures. The elves are surrounded by starred skulls, Mickey and revisited Batman dance around skeletons perched on giant birthday cakes...
He draws his references as well from art history, everyday life or pop culture and develops a personal mythology, a dream world, by reappropriating the imagery of childhood between humor and derision.
At the origin of Fabien Verschaere's work, there is the vital need to tell stories. Quite spontaneously, the child he is then turns to the comic book and begins to develop a whole series of characters, small heroes with whom he can escape. Here we find everything that will characterize the work of the artist to come, which he first built in the Fine Arts of Paris in the workshops of Giuseppe Penone and Jean-Marc Bustamante. The drawing, always, is present. It manifests itself as the immediate translation of an idea, a thought, an affect, and serves as a starting point for achieving performances or installations.
Since it is an automatic writing, the drawing at Fabien Verschaere is manifested through a glossary of shapes and characters constantly revisited and reworked as the characters of his first watercolours. There are menacing skeletons or joyful vanities, grumpy clowns or evil angels, transvestite princesses or determined boxers and it is not uncommon to find the artist's self-portrait behind each of them. Do these characters come from a dream or a nightmare? Did they escape from a fairy tale or, on the contrary, from our daily life? This really does not matter to us, since together they form this playful, strange and wonderful universe through which we are absorbed.
Thanks to a continuous line forming a rich magma of shapes, Verschaere creates a charged space, saturated and full of details without ever forgetting the global composition, which increasingly tends to contain itself in a unique form. This image, which appears to be closed, seems to be self-generating and is therefore not sheltered from further uncontrolled growth. Thus arises a contemporary arrangement, like an arc stretched towards the past to build a current mythology.
The light practice of drawing allows the artist to talk about everything, to portray any impulse through the vocabulary of an imaginary child. But be careful, this joyful masquerade is never very far from a disaster.
Biography from the artist's site: https://www.verschaerefabien.com
