"/>
Born in Rome in 1926, Fabio Mauri took his first steps in the art world in the early 1950s, making his debut in 1954 with a solo exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, where he exhibited his first paintings and drawings on paper. In 1957 the artist made his first Schermo, a germinal work on which he grafted all subsequent artistic research.
In Rome, Mauri combined his commitment to visual arts with the one of theater director and collaborator in his uncle, Valentino Bompiani, publishing house. He forged relationships with artists and intellectuals in the Roman milieu around Piazza del Popolo, collaborated on television programs, wrote songs and plays. He was close to the poets of Gruppo 63 with some of whom he founded the magazine "Quindici" and "La Città di Riga."
In the 1970s Mauri shifted his focus toward the research on ideological sign. The performance What is Fascism and the following installation with performance Ebrea, in which Mauri brings to light the horrors produced by Nazi-fascist ideology, were the first outputs of that research. Later on, Mauri produced numerous masterpieces, in which he deconstructs the ideological machine by highlighting its distortions and aberrations.
After the historic performance Intellettuale (1975), in which Mauri projected the film "Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo" on the chest of director Pier Paolo Pasolini, the artist made a series of installations with projections of cinematographic works onto bodies and objects. For Mauri, the whole world was a screen and the ray of light modified the send of an object and created new meanings, transmitting its own forms of thought on non-neutral surfaces that intercept its signal.
In 1979 Mauri began teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila, where he created, together with his students, the performances Gran Serata Futurista 1909-1930 (1980) and Che cosa è la filosofia. Heidegger and the German Question (1989). In 2000 he founded the Studio Fabio Mauri - Association for Art The World Experiment aimed at the production and preservation of his works and archive. He passed away in Rome in 2009.
Fabio Mauri's works have been exhibited in prestigious international venues such as PS1 in New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Moca in Los Angeles, Philadelphia Civic Center Museum, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume and Le Bal in Paris, and La Caixa in Barcelona. Since 1994, major retrospectives have been devoted to him at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Kunsthalle in Klagenfurt, Le Fresnoy Museum in Lille, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Madre Museum in Naples, the Heart Museum in Herning, Mo, the Museo del Novecento in Florence, the Castello di Rivoli and major rooms at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Mamco in Geneva as well as Documenta(13) in Kassel, the 14th Istanbul Biennial and six Venice Biennials.