Berlinde De Bruyckere
I saw my first Berlinde De Bruyckere sculpture in a group exhibit about death, while I was at a New York contemporary art museum. I remember thinking how precariously balanced the headless figure was and noticing the contrast of her smooth skin with the violence implied by her headlessness.
La Femme sans Tête, 2003
wax, epoxy, iron
De Bruyckere’s distorted sculptures of the human body address themes of anger, fear, loneliness and loss, taking countless casts of human figures, she wanted to capture bodies ‘in a moment of pain’.
As her practice continued, she started to feel that there was too much of a direct connection between viewers and her pieces when she used the human form, people were drawing comparisons with their own body and taking her work too literally.
Born 1964, in Belgium, De Bruyckere spent much of her childhood watching her father, a butcher, working dead animals into smaller cuts, ready to be sold and I wonder if that has had an impact on her art.
K36 (The Black Horse), 2003
In 1999, while researching a piece for the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres to commemorate the victims and horror of the First World War. De Bruyckere saw archived images of dying and mutilated horse remains that had been killed during battle, completely innocent victims of the war.
“The body of the horse, it is close to us - but not too close. We like it, we see it everywhere. It is one of the best friends of human beings. And it has such a beauty and such a mind. ”
De Bruyckere has worked with many horse carcasses, taking countless photographs and preparing numerous silicone moulds of each horse. She then paints the insides with up to twenty layers of warm wax coloured with different glazes.
“I am working on the surface of my sculptures like a painter. We never see what we are doing - we have to wait until we take it out, then we can see. If it’s not OK, we melt it and start all over again. ”
Courtyard Tales V, 2018
Layers are a recurring theme in De Bruyckere’s work, recently she has turned her attention to blankets, comparing them to the layers what we have inside our minds, especially when it comes to our memory. Sourcing blankets from charity and second-hand shops to ensure that all of her blankets have lived through some kind of human experience.
“After a season, you throw clothes away, but the blanket on your bed stays there forever... [The bed is] the place where you make love, where you give birth, where you have children, where you die...”
Just like the human body, the blankets used in Courtyard Tales are ageing and suffering. In the two years between sourcing the blankets and the completed pieces, the fabric of the blankets have been hung outside De Bruyckere’s studio, buried bleached, rotted and permanently damaged by the sun, rain and animals.
While looking at the blankets ageing in her courtyard, De Bruyckere couldn’t help but be reminded of the refugee crisis, having seen countless images on TV of people around the world wrapped in blankets. These camps became part of her motivation to move away from focusing on the human body, to focus on a different kind of pain.
“the wounds and marks they will have as survivors are no longer physical, but a question of ‘being unrooted’, of having ‘to fill up your life again and start with nothing’... to leave your country ”
Anderlecht, 2018
De Bruyckere has moulded ‘Anderlecht’ from stacks of hides which were cured in salt at a local tannery in Ghent and dyed grey. The journey the hides have taken to become ‘Anderlecht’ is a crucial piece of the art, going from living individuals to a single mass of death. Something that we are becoming more accustomed to accepting with humans.
“The mass is so heavy to carry, and to carry mentally. It’s not just one death, it’s an enormous amount of death... When you die in a war, you become an anonymous person, because so many people die during a war, but for your family, for your wife, you are still who you are. And now, putting all these layers on top of each other, for me, it becomes a metaphor for death and anonymity.”
I personally love how De Bruyckere’s mind works, how she is able to draw a correlation between seemingly unconnected items, which become so obvious once she explains them. Her work is definitely challenging, but in the best possible way.
Featured image of Berlinde De Bruyckere by Mirjam Devriendt