Berlinde De Bruyckere
Since the early nineties, Berlinde De Bruyckere has been working with blankets–woolen blankets that cover and protect–as the material for her sculptures and installations. For De Bruyckere they symbolize not only warmth and shelter, but also vulnerability and fear. Fear that makes people crawl under blankets and vulnerability in situations related to cold, illness, disaster and war. They are the images–from Somalia, Ruanda or Kosovo–which the media show us every day: images from hotbeds of violence which cause the population to flee, to hide or to shiver from cold. Victims are wrapped in blankets. The suffering is covered. In De Bruyckere’s studio, such newspaper photographs are present as quiet moments among the day-to-day memoranda. They are often images in which sadness and beauty seem to compete for attention.
One of De Bruyckere’s first sculptures with blankets consisted of a simple stack of folded blankets on an unsteady wooden stool (untitled, 1991). The order and balance of the stack are almost literally undermined here by the tremendously tilted base. Dekenhuis (House of Blankets) from 1993 is a metal cage over which blankets have been draped. One corner of the cage remains uncovered, but the ‘house of blankets’ is inaccessible and offers only the suggestion of shelter. Berlinde De Bruyckere says the following about the use of blankets in her work: “To me, a blanket is a symbol of security. It has a soul, which usually has a positive connotation. A blanket tucks you in; you feel like the child sitting indoors while it’s raining outside. I also use the blanket as a negative object. You can give someone so much love and safety that it smothers him, that he can no longer find himself. Lying under a pile of blankets can be disorienting! I like to play with that ambiguity in my work.�
It is the duality of love and suffering, danger and protection, life and death with which the work of De Bruyckere constantly deals. Onschuld kan een hel zijn (Innocence can be hell) was the title of her presentation in Park Middelheim in 1995. For this she created, among other things, open containers stuffed with piles of blankets (Kooi 1995). Cheerful in color but, at the same time, macabre in appearance: an emergency transport of relief aid which would never reach its destination. The powerless gesture of this work seems to be repeated in the various figures of women whose arms and legs are lifelike, but whose bodies are hidden under blankets for the rest. In Middelheim she situated one such figure in a tree (Vrouw in boom II 1995). Sitting on a branch, she grabs onto the sturdy trunk. De Bruyckere compares the isolation in which the woman finds herself to that of a child who hides and thinks “if I don’t see them, they can’t see me.� In reference to her ‘blanket women’ she says, “The relationship between showing and hiding is a relationship that occurs within a single image. I produced the image of the ‘blanket woman’ for the first time during the period of genocide in Ruanda in 1993-1994. I show an image of someone who actually doesn’t want to be seen. At that point I myself was occupied with the issue of the essence of a house. To me, this is a place in which to hide, to be alone, to be able to think. Then I saw people fleeing with only a blanket to protect themselves, to cover themselves. That’s how the image came about for me.�
Threatened security is also expressed in an installation with three beds (untitled 1996). The two single beds and one child’s bed are heavily laden with a stack of one hundred colorful blankets. Deep, round holes have been drilled in the layer of blankets at various places.
Her contribution to the outdoor project Speelhoven ‘98 consisted of a large carpet of 112,000 begonias measuring eighteen by twenty-seven meters. In a certain sense this was reminiscent of the work I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1992), which was comprised of a wicker basket filled with roses made of lead. But the begonia carpet also reminds us of mortality in the wilting, the drying and eventual rotting and disintegration of the flowers.
The installation in which five horses are shown, In Flanders Fields, is gripping. Berlinde De Bruyckere produced this work during the summer of 2000 and presented it at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ieper. Here the casts of horses’ bodies were covered with hide and modelled into the dramatic poses of their death throes. Here the powerful horses portray desperation and vulnerability as in Picasso’s Guernica, where they are shown broken and contorted in their fall. In the exhibition Lustwarande, pleasure garden (Tilburg 2000) and Locus/Focus (Sonsbeek 9, Arnhem 2001) she hung, to the shock of many visitors, casts of horses bodies high in the trees.
The themes of mortality and the duality of life and death are also expressed in the work found in De Pont’s collection: Het hart uitgerukt (The heart torn out) is the title of a series of drawn portraits from 1997-1998, in which morbid faces stare at us with hollow eyes. With the sculpture Aaneen-genaaid I (Sewn together I) (2000), the torso is formed by blankets sewn together, while bare legs seem to provide the figure with a minimum of stability. And the series of drawings with the same title shows body shapes that have fused together.
