COPENHAGEN.- It is a familiar choreography: the instinctive withdrawal of the body as a needle pierces the skin – the eyes lifting toward and resting on the ceiling above. For Davide Hjort Di Fabio, this upward gaze has become tied to the perforated hospital ceiling panels he encounters during recurring blood tests. The surface overhead seems to echo the body below; its tiny openings mirror the sensation in the arm, as though space and flesh were briefly responding to one another. Architecture is so often shaped around us, attentive to our needs and vulnerabilities. Yet in this moment of reciprocity, a question gathers force: Who is modelling whom?
In Clip-In, his first exhibition with NILS STÆRK, Di Fabio introduces new wall-hung and floor-based sculptures. Most works in the exhibition originate from casts of his torso in clay, acting as a point of gestural departure. Once lifted from the mold, the forms open and stretch, loosening themselves from the body that initiated them. Repetition guides this unfolding: the gestures of casting and reshaping accumulate over time, leaving traces that drift from their bodily source and settle into hybrid imprints, part mechanical and part biological. The sculptures feel intimate yet estranged, gestures that recall a beginning without returning to it.
Di Fabio’s works take on a quiet autonomy, appearing less as objects than as forms in a state of becoming. One encounters sculptures that lean, fold, swell, or settle into precarious postures, carrying the logic of the body through impulse rather than depiction: a contour folding as if remembering pressure, a mass tilting as if testing its own gravity. This tension deepens through the firing process, where clay undergoes its own internal transitions: shrinking, tightening, and fixing impulses that began as soft gestures. The sculptures pause in moments of suspension, negotiating between collapse and elevation. Their glazed surfaces shift between saturated and luminous tonalities, reinforcing the sense of forms still discovering their presence.
It is within this sculptural terrain that the architectural reference returns. Clip-In takes its title from the product designation of the perforated hospital ceiling panels. Reoriented, stacked, and reconfigured as a wall element and sculptural supports, these panels function less as motifs than as a faint architectural memory that once framed vulnerability and now subtly shapes perception.
Across Clip-In, architecture and anatomy fold into one another, trading roles without abandoning their difference. A ceiling becomes a wall; a wall becomes support; support becomes a body; the body becomes a form in continuous transformation. Di Fabio invites us into this threshold, where body and structure imprint upon one another, and where a form detaches, shifts its posture, and takes on a life beyond the body that first inscribed it.
Davide Hjort Di Fabio (b. 1990, Italy) works with sculpture, video and installation. His practice approaches sculpture as an extension of the human body, using materials such as ceramics, metal, and plastic to form abstract and organic sculptures. Through these material explorations, he examines queerness as a fluid and relational condition shaped by personal experiences and historical contexts. His work reflects on how bodies are continuously formed and negotiated within social, ecological, and structural frameworks.
Davide Hjort Di Fabio (b. 1990, Italy) lives and works in Copenhagen. He recevied his MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2024) and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2022). Recent exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2024), the Italian Cultural Institute (2024), Vejen Art Museum (2023), Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm (2021), and Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (2020). In 2026, he will exhibit at Politikens Forhal and Fotografisk Center. In 2023, he received the Anne Marie Carl Nielsen Talent Prize for Sculptors.
