Berlinde De Bruyckere

‘You don't look at my work to feel happy,’ says Berlinde De Bruyckere, the Belgian artist who has made a name for herself with an oeuvre that centres on the body and human vulnerability. Her poignant sculptures, installations, drawings and watercolours take you away to a dark and at times macabre world full of human and animal suffering, but where she also offers hope and relief. She shows us the beauty and comfort concealed in decay and inevitable death. For her, wounds are not something ugly, but rather something we all have and must learn to live with.

Every one of her works contains a metamorphosis. In them, motifs like the human body, trees, blankets and horses merge into something else, just as people are shaped and altered by personal, social or political factors. When you surrender to the metamorphic process, she says, you learn to cope with the complexity of a world where nothing is certain.

De Bruyckere first gained renown in the 1990s with her ‘blanket women’: wax sculptures of battered female figures with a portion of their bodies hidden by a blanket which can both smother and offer protection, see Aanéén-genaaid I. Her focus later shifted to human figures with long hair, and then to more abstract, amorphous bodies, sometimes in combination with well-worn objects such as antique cupboards, see Eén. Her figures have no faces, just to avoid making it easy on the viewer. The artist enjoys subverting expectations.

The materials and surfaces she chooses are essential. She left her blankets outdoors, exposing them to the elements, because she was fascinated by the effects of time and nature on the changing materials. Fragile wax reinforces the sense of transience. She works the surfaces down to the smallest detail until they become carriers of repressed emotions, of a soul even. Yet some aspect always remains hidden – just as all human beings inevitably remain a mystery.