Berlinde De Bruyckere — Infinitum — Galleria Continua / Le Moulin — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 26 → October 3, 2010

The sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere is considered to be one of the major female Belgian artists today. She was born in Gent in 1964 where she lives and works..

Her solitary figures are formed from an assembly of heterogeneous, plant and organic materials (wax, wood, hair…). Berlinde De Bruyckere evokes death and violence. Her bodies with cyanotic skin, often without a head, and sometimes without gender, and her hung or slumped animals, infringe on imagination linked with the theme of brutality. She re-elaborates anatomical images and shapes to spark duality between terror and pity, love and suffering, peril and protection, confronting the state of abandon of the body. She thus appropriates certain structural codes peculiar to the representation of the suffering body in medieval or Renaissance painting.

The concept of duality is at last all the more valued by the choice of her subjects: animals and plants bear the contrasts of the superior and inferior world describing the distance between the earth as well as the spiritual, like a gap which seems equally to govern the universe of man. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s work has been exhibited at La Maison Rouge in Paris, at MUKHA in Anvers, the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino and the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art.