Berlinde De Bruyckere — Galleria Continua
Galleria Continua in the Marais presents a superb exhibition by Berlinde De Bruyckere, whose last solo presentation in Paris dates back several years. An exceptional project that celebrates this work of visceral beauty, where the organic, the mineral, and the vegetal enter into a macabre dance filled with a dual sensuality, oscillating between desire and anguish.
In this abyss of opposites, this major artist, who has succeeded in inventing an unprecedented and coherent aesthetic vocabulary, unfolds a variation on need, which gives the exhibition its title, combining impulse and desire, formalization and eruption.
Around a monumental piece—a ghostly mare taking on the incidentally phallic shape of a veterinary tool designed to collect stallion semen—smaller works are inspired by the “enclosed gardens,” those extraordinary Flemish creations of the sixteenth century that reproduced, within painting-sculpture hybrids, biblical episodes. Biological sexuality and the idealization of abstinence confront each other in a body of work whose thread the artist seems to unravel, offering through matter a formalization of their twin nature.
Within the folds and creases of the material, stories can be sensed—stories stripped of human figures and other legible symbols (flowers, trees)—that explore the very substance of our projections. Frozen in their decay, these boxes display as many gaps, as many zones of danger and attraction as their inspirations, reflecting through their outgrowths the primal impossibility of truly containing them. In a mirror effect, the artist’s glass bells imprison equally striking organisms, using the polysemy of her chosen material, glass, to disturb both the senses and the imagination. Here, feelings are lost in a delirium mingling terror with the drive to know, the need to feel. Yet the mystery doubles back on itself; the multitude of references to classical painting and the omnipresence of biblical imagery lead us toward illusion, as if these were relics of other beings who came before us—remnants of giants lost in the depths of mythological oblivion. But nothing here is meant for veneration; everything is to be observed from an infinity of angles.
In an infinity of variations, like the final series that gives the exhibition its name, Need. Continuing this sensory hybridization and resembling an implosion of desire, De Bruyckere integrates behind glass cases breathtaking movements of matter, inspired by a more melodramatic reversal—that of Saint Benedict throwing himself into thorns in an attempt, he believes, to purify his soul.
By stripping her interpretation of any human figure, Berlinde De Bruyckere operates on an almost experimental plane, documenting the collision between blunt matter and flesh, technically replaying the tearing of flesh to unearth the conceptual charge it was meant to carry. How, indeed, does the human soul manage to articulate through the body—through its trials—the perseverance of its desire? Transmuted into a moral contraction, emotional need thus turns toward another object: the adoration of a god who is no less a symptom of a passion devouring bodies to the bone.
Like a magnifying lens, the collision of materials behind the glass re-enacts the instant of destruction, the passage from balance to madness, from desire to need. The elements encroach upon one another to better reflect the vertigo of human emotions, their contradictions as much as their scope, to the extreme point of risking one’s own life. A subtle and rich synthesis born of restraint, this series offers a brilliant reflection of the artist’s organic œuvre and radiates its insolent strength, burning with sensuality and death. For in fine, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s art is never more fully experienced than in its brutal directness.
The strategy of shock, the attraction and balance of a flesh-based aesthetic inevitably mirror our own intimacy, holding up a mysterious reflection of our inner world and laying bare, before all eyes, those viscera and bones that set our feelings in motion.
Berlinde De Bruyckere, Need, 10.10.2025 — 12.30.2025, Galleria Continua, 87 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris — From Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-7pm
