July 3, 2007Luciano Fabro, Italian Artist, Dies at 70By RANDY KENNEDYLuciano Fabro, a prominent artist and theorist in Arte Povera, a movement that began in Italy in the 1960s and championed unusual materials and unorthodox ideas, died on June 22 in Milan. He was 70.The cause was a heart attack, said Filippo Fossati, an owner of Esso Gallery in Chelsea, whose father, Paolo Fossati, an art historian, published one of Mr. Fabro’s first books.Mr. Fabro was born in Turin and, after his father’s death, was raised around Udine, in the Friuli region. He decided at 12 to become an artist and was largely self-taught, influenced early by the work of artists like Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, whose slashed canvases and sculptural lumps prefigured some of Arte Povera’s freedom and rebelliousness.After seeing Mr. Fontana’s work at the 1958 Venice Biennale, Mr. Fabro moved to Milan to pursue an artistic career and remained there for the rest of his life, working and teaching.He quickly abandoned painting, and some of his earliest works in the ’60s — like “Hole,” a mirror with the reflective backing partly scraped away, and “Wheel,” a metal hoop attached to a rod that bends from the strain of the hoop’s weight — were explorations of intricate principles he was forming about perception and illusion. He described his work, possibly with some humorous exaggeration, as “Herculean,” leaving behind the “easy, seductive, flowery way.” Throughout his career his art output was accompanied by prolific writing and lecturing about its meaning.He is probably best known for a series of sculptural reliefs he made in the shape of Italy, fashioned out of glass, steel, bronze, gold and even soft leather.Though considered a father of the loose collection of artists grouped under the Arte Povera name, Mr. Fabro was often at odds with the movement’s prevailing aesthetics, saying in one interview that he felt like the “heretic of the Arte Povera church.”While he was better known in Europe, his work received more attention in the United States as he aged. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a 25-year retrospective in 1992, and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York also showed his work in the 1990s.Roberta Smith, reviewing the San Francisco exhibition in The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Fabro operated with “supreme self-confidence” and seemed to treat “art-making less as a profession and more as a continuing experiment intended to keep himself entertained and the viewer slightly off balance.”Mr. Fabro’s wife, Carla, died within the last three years, Ms. Gladstone said. He is survived by a daughter, Sylvia Fabro of Milan.