Five female icons of the Belgian art world: Berlinde De Bruyckere
Belga English paints the portraits of five renowned female artists from Belgium – in words. Today: Berlinde De Bruyckere, who has been exploring the human condition for 30 years. Her current exhibition Khorós at Bozar provides an overview of her fascinating and haunting body of work.
Berlinde De Bruyckere, born in Ghent in 1964, has spent three decades exploring the vulnerability of man, the power of nature and the dualities of love and suffering, danger and protection, and life and death. Her work deals with the fundamental human search for transformation and reconciliation in the face of mortality.
These are weighty themes that she reflects on deeply and converts into poignant – and often monumental – sculptures, installations, drawings and collages.
About what moves her and drives her to create, De Bruyckere has said that "it’s the eternal horror and beauty that we as humans cannot fully comprehend, yet remain an integral part of”.
“My work is always a reflection of how I observe and question the world, both as a human being and as an artist," she says.
She prefers to work with unconventional materials such as wax, animal skins, hair, worn blankets, trees, flowers and rusted metal. In many cases, she gives new meaning to discarded objects.
With these materials, she creates hybrid forms with often haunting human, animal and organic features. When making bodies, she shows their vitality, decay and constant transformation.
She is particularly known for her monumental installations of hanging horse carcasses, which she first presented during an exhibition at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres.
As a butcher’s daughter, she was exposed to animal carcasses at a young age, but after a visit to a hide dealer in Brussels in 2014, she also began working extensively with animal skins. She saw how the hides of slaughtered animals were prepared for tanneries—inspected, hoisted, and salted in an almost ritualistic manner.
“Nowhere else have I experienced life and death so closely as there,” she said about the visit.
In 2013, she represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, where she unveiled her monumental work Kreupelhout – Cripplewood, a collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning novelist JM Coetzee. The work was a cross between a felled giant tree, a war victim and a phallus.
She returned to Venice last year with City of Refuge III in a Renaissance-style church. Taking its title from a Nick Cave song, the work showed how art itself can serve as a place of sanctuary and shelter.
The protagonists in City of Refuge III were the figures of angels from her recent Arcangelo series, inspired by the healthcare workers who relieved suffering during the Covid pandemic.
In her works, De Bruyckere often considers wounds inflicted today: in war zones, slaughterhouses, nature reserves and hospitals. Her intention is to incite reflection, but also to offer comfort and hope. That’s why the pietà – Italian for “compassion” – a figure showing mercy to another, is a common character in her exhibitions.
It's clear that De Bruyckere is profoundly influenced by traditions of the Flemish Renaissance and draws inspiration from the legacies of the European Old Masters and Christian iconography. She has often cited the work of 15th-century painter Rogier van der Weyden, one of the most important Flemish Primitives, as a major inspiration.
But she looks beyond the West as well, and is fascinated by mythology and cultural traditions from all over the world. Her journeys to India in particular left a deep impression and influenced her creative output.
In the current exhibition Khorós at Bozar, she also highlights the sexual side of her oeuvre, the passion and lust.
“That dimension has always been somewhat overlooked in the response to my work, perhaps because it does not fit with the image people have of me,” she said in a recent interview with BRUZZ.
"My work is always a reflection of how I observe and question the world, both as a human being and as an artist"
In the Bozar exhibition, she also enters into a dialogue with artists she considers “compagnons de route”, like Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder and modern icons such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Patti Smith. And with her own husband, sculptor Peter Buggenhout.
“Peter is the person I engage in daily dialogue with,” she told BRUZZ. “We are like yin and yang: our work could not be more different in form, because Peter completely rejects the figurative approach. But in terms of content, we have a lot in common. He often works with materials that don’t seem to have real value but are heavily charged, just as I work with worn blankets and dead trees.”
#FlandersNewsService | © Berlinde De Bruyckere at the opening of Khoros at Bozar in Brussels, February 2025 © BELGA PHOTO TIMON RAMBOER
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