Shifting between the sublime and the grotesque, Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere's sculptures, which frequently include materials such as animal skins, epoxy, glass, wood, and metal, transfer themes and iconography from the Flemish Renaissance, Christianity, and European Old Masters to explore the dualities of human existence.
Read MoreDe Bruyckere was born in Ghent, Belgium—where she currently lives and works—in 1964. At the age of five, she was sent to a Catholic boarding school—an experience she returns to in her work through reflections on suffering, despair, loneliness, and fear. In 1986, the artist graduated from the LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, receiving the Young Belgian Art Prize just three years later.
Berlinde De Bruyckere's early works were influenced by the post-Minimalist and Arte Povera movements, utilising found materials and geometric forms to relay a certain affect. Kooi, which translates from Dutch to 'cage', consists of a low-lying steel structure with square openings arranged across its surface in a grid. These early cage structures explore feelings of entrapment, with later cages incorporating blankets in their interiors to reflect on notions of home and comfort within such forms.
At the end of the 1990s, Berlinde De Bruyckere began incorporating the human figure into her work with greater frequency. In sculptures such as Spreken (To Speak) (1999), the blanket appears once more, this time covering the bodies of two figures rendered in polyurethane—just their feet are visible.
The two figures bend forward, their heads meeting in consolation, the warmth suggested by the blanket contrasted with a sense of vulnerability. The works were inspired by images found in the media, particularly of the famine in Somalia and the genocide in Rwanda, where blankets cover individuals in various states of vulnerability.
In 1999, De Bruyckere turned her interest to the figure of the horse. Traditionally perceived as strong and powerful, her residency at In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, where she encountered photographs of horses killed on the battlefield, inspired her work with the animal.
De Bruyckere's sculptures render the horse as an amorphous entity often devoid of features such as the eyes and head, and with other body parts reconfigured. K36 (The Black Horse), which was shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale, consisted of a horse's body abstracted into a silent mass, its fur creating a glossy sheen across the curves of the sculpture's surface.
De Bruyckere achieves further abstraction of the body in epoxy and wax sculptures such as Marthe (2008), in which a visceral sculpture of a figure with pinkish-blue skin leans forward, arms and head obscured by a tangling mass of limbs that cascade to the ground. Once more, viewers are both repelled and drawn closer, with the helpless physicality of the sculpture instilling a sense of vulnerability.
The impact of De Bruyckere's works is often emphasised through scale, as in the case of Aletheia, on-vergeten (Truth, unforgotten) (2019). Inspired by her visit to a skin trader's workshop in Anderlecht, Belgium, in 2013, De Bruyckere created masses of piled animal skins, dusted with salt to resemble fallen snow. With hints of orange, pink, and blue, the pelts come together as an abstract reflection on death at a catastrophic level, whether the Holocaust or the deaths of refugees trying to reach Europe.
The artist's 'It almost seemed a lily' series comprises framed layers of wallpaper and blankets in abject, coagulating formations. The series was inspired by Enclosed Gardens—private altars dating back to the 16th century and depicting heavenly gardens in hand-crafted objects.
In particular, De Bruyckere was inspired by renditions of the lily. 'I connect the petals of the lilies to images of skin, of flesh; their fragrance to lust and pleasure; their unsavoury smell while wilting to ephemerality and pain,' the artist has explained.
Berlinde De Bruyckere is represented by Hauser & Wirth and Galleria Continua.
De Bruyckere's works have been collected by renowned private and institutional collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Collezione Gori Fattoria di Celle, Pistoia; and La Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris.
De Bruyckere has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain (2022); Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen (2022); Middelheimmuseum, Antwerp (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2019); and Kunsthal Aarhus (2017), to name a few. In 2013, the artist represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, where her pavilion was curated by Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee.
Select group exhibitions include The Cleanest Feeling, KMSKA, Antwerp (2022); Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection, The Drawing Center, New York (2021); The Intelligence of Plants, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2021); Convex/Concave: Belgian Contemporary Art, TANK Shanghai (2019), and Opera as the World: The quest for a total work of art, Centre Pompidou-Metz (2019).
Tessa Moldan | Ocula | 2023
