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Eva Fàbregas at Hamburger Bahnhof

July 20, 2023

Artist: Eva Fàbregas

Exhibition title: Devouring Lovers

Curated by: Anna-Catharina Gebbers

Venue: Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany

Date: July 6, 2023 – January 14, 2024

Photography: ©Jacopo La Forgia / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Bombon Projects, Barcelona

Note: Exhibition’s booklet is available here

Eva Fàbregas takes over the historical hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof with a monumental, site-specific installation. The artist’s largest solo exhibition to date expands the boundaries of sculpture, inviting visitors to a sensual, spatial experience. Biomorphous sculptures transform the museum’s architecture, which is character- ized by industrial iron girders, into an organically grown space.

With this new commission, Fàbregas (b. 1988 in Barcelona, lives and works in London and Barcelona) responds to the passage-like architec- ture of Hamburger Bahnhof’s main historical hall. The soft and bodily ob- jects, characteristic of the artist’s work, spread out throughout the entire space, from the sides, from the ceiling, and through the metal structures. Slight vibrations and movements emanating from them cannot be clearly identified, but are almost physically perceptible. The mix of sculpture and movement reorients the visitors’ experience of the hall. The borders be- tween technically generated, and the human and non-human worlds be- come blurred. Visitors find themselves immersed in this organic-technical environment.

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What are the limitations of desire? How can a feeling be transmitted through and with objects? These are some of the fundamental questions that Eva Fàbregas explores through her work. For her largest solo exhibition to date, the Barcelona-based artist has created a monumental installation that she conceived especially for Hamburger Bahnhof’s main historical hall. Flesh-like sculptures wind around the hall’s metal girders, like devouring lovers, creating a surreal impression of organs growing from metal. Slight vibrations animate some of the seventy sculptures reinforcing the impression of tentacles. The entire hall becomes a breathing organism where the boundaries between the technologically generated and the human / non-human worlds blur.

Working with soft and malleable materials, Eva Fàbregas’ work embraces tactile engagement, physical intimacy, and sensorial relations, where touch is a primary source of knowledge. Her work is about learning through one’s fingers and the sculptures are often reminiscent of body organs and voluptuous glands, but she also looks at prosthetics as well as non-human life forms such as corals, polyps and the reproductive parts of plants. Fàbregas aims to fully inhabit the world of the senses, creating sculptures that invoke a pre-linguistic stage to imagine other possible bodies, other ways of feeling, caring and being in the world.