Berlinde De Bruyckere, Into One Another I to P.P.P., 2010 – 2011. Copyright Mirjam Devriendt
Berlinde De Bruyckere’s survey aptly opens with “Kreupelhout – Cripplewood” (2012–2013), her monumental installation for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Featuring a fallen tree cast in a flesh-like encaustic, it’s as if blood were running through the haunting sculpture.
Indeed, the wounded body is a recurrent theme in De Bruyckere’s oeuvre. The work group “Into One-Another to P.P.P.” (2010–2011), dedicated to Pierre Paolo Pasolini, features human-like figures in antique glass and wood vitrines. Casts from different models are sutured to form disfigured bodies, as if swallowing each other, or otherwise horribly mutilated.
De Bruyckere conjures parables on the duality of desire and destruction. “Romeu ‘my deer’”, (2010–2011) depicts a body folded forwards, ground-length antlers sprouting out of its head. Alluding to Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, De Bruyckere imagines Actaeon’s transmutation just moments before the hunter is devoured by his own hunting dogs.
Similarly uncanny are the nightmarish horse skin works, which inspire conflicting feelings of compassion, disgust and horror. While De Bruyckere’s work renders mortality palpable, it is not without nuance; vulnerability is evinced by wounds, but also in traces of movement. “Hanne” (2003), the only sculpture in the show made from a cast of a single model, shows an inward-turned figure whose head and front are concealed behind a cascading mass of hair. The impulse is to offer solace – not to look away.
Berlinde de Bruyckere, “Sculptures & Drawings 2000-2914” is on view at S.M.A.K., Ghent until February 15, 2015
Text von Hili Perlson
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