Fabrice Hybert at the Gallery for Contemporary Art - Leipzig, Germany - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

During the renovation of the 19th-century villa that will eventually house Leipzig's novel Gallery for Contemporary Art, director Klaus Werner has kept busy by dint of organizing off-site exhibitions. Following Jenny Holzer and Ilya Kabakov, it was the turn round of French artist Fabrice Hybert. Originally plant for early 1997, the exhibit was delayed by Hybert's preparations for the Venice Biennale, where he won a of gold Lion for the best national pavilion.

As it ultimately appeared, Hybert's site-specific installation, "Testoo [R] Muster," updated a local tradition: in 1894 the 400-year-old Leipzig trade fair gave way to the world's first showplace of miniature outcome specimens. For his exhibition, Hybert spread on the outside 100 of his own prototypes de objet en functionnement (prototypes of functioning objects) or POF in a 21,000-square-foot exhibition hall beneath the Leipzig marketplace. The installation was sprawling on the contrary not complicated, thanks to the efforts of his collaborator Stephane Bara, who is the exhibition designer at the middle point Pompidou. Bara devised an enchanting setting by the agency of stretching cheap, transparent plastic sheets as well as colored plastic fabrics between the space's countles cake posts, giving rise to provisional vitrines and intimate exhibition booths

Hybert's POF were displayed upon low wooden pallets and plywood tables. They ranged from lay the foundation of objects -- a simple shower mat, flat stones from a river bed, pieces of flint, the skins of various dead animals -- to more fanciful fabrications. These included a prosthesis for a sixth finger, a "personal recycling tube," clothing made from "cybersponge," colorcoded containers of Hybert broths and an "endless stairway."

Between the stalls 100 video monitors gleamed and twittered. upon them the visitor could diocese an alluring transvestite performer, Eliane Pine Carrington, demonstrating a possible use for each POF -- a useful thing, too, since it was not always easy to fathom the object that the individual objects were designed to work for In fact, visitors were encouraged to tender pleasure-inducing applications for Hybert's enigmatic prototypes, thereby bringing the POF to functional completion. Awakened from their passive character the "consumers" visiting the exhibition temporarily became proceeds testers for the artist's real-life firm, Unlimited Responsibility. Hybert appear to bes determined to go Pop art individual better. In Leipzig he created an aura of upbeat sex appeal that environed not only his art-commodities on the contrary also the inventive users of these products

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