The art of Berlinde De Bruyckere: ‘I love this idea of transformation, of growing into something else’

Of all the collateral events at the Venice Biennale this year, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s City of Refuge III at San Giorgio Maggiore is arguably the most unsettling. Situated inside the 16th-century church are larger-than-life shrouded figures and wooden vitrines containing cold, waxy, amorphous forms that provoke a raw emotional response in the viewer.

Created from old and worn organic materials — fabric, resin, wax and animal hair — the sculptures are weirdly beautiful in their decaying, temporal dread. The artist has a knack for alchemising humble, even abject ingredients into works of art that resemble the ritual debris of ancient cultures.

Born in Ghent in 1964, the daughter of a butcher, De Bruyckere grew up watching her father cut up carcasses. ‘I am not afraid of dead bodies,’ she says. ‘I am used to seeing them.’ It was only when she began looking at Dutch still-life painting while a student at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent that she saw the inherent beauty of death, rather than its horror. ‘Still-life paintings force us to look, often at dead animals… I learnt how to make a meaningful composition with the dead bodies of horses, foals and deer… death as a moment of rest and repose.’

She was sent to a Catholic boarding school at an early age, where effigies of saints and sculptures of the crucifixion left a profound visual impression on her. ‘The nail is a rusty, very aggressive symbol in relation to Christianity,’ she says. Flesh — its suffering and its redemption — is a recurring theme in her work: ‘I want to show how powerless the body can be.’

Early sculptures consisted of wax body parts melted into twisted physiological forms and painted in sallow pinks and greys: the colours of bruised skin and open wounds. Soon after, De Bruyckere began to work with animal skins, manipulating hides into bizarre, mutated forms. She has moulded layers of animal pelts into vast bulky forms, recalling those sepia-tinged photographs of European hunters who slaughtered species to extinction.

The artist has made similar sculptures out of decaying blankets, works she describes as complex carriers of meaning, ‘of memories, good and bad’ — an allusion to blankets being both a means of protection and of suffocation.

In 2013, De Bruyckere was selected to represent Belgium at the Venice Biennale. She took inspiration from the city itself, the beauty of which lies in what has crumbled, in the evidence of decay and disease: the blackened walls swollen by canal water, the tiny flakes of plaster clinging onto brickwork, the memorials to the victims of the Black Death which wiped out half the population in the 1300s. The resulting sculpture, Cripplewood, consisted of tree branches wrapped in wax and cloth that echoed the fat and felt works of Joseph Beuys.

De Bruyckere often collaborates with writers and musicians, and feels a deep kinship with poetry, which she says is ‘powerful and immediate as an image. There is an element of mystery to it, of the unknown, a blank that we fill in with our own being.’

These are the bare bones of It Almost Seemed a Lily III, 2017, a sculpture offered in the Post-War to Present sale on 27 June 2024 at Christie’s in London. The work is one of a series made for an exhibition at the Museum Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen, Belgium, in 2018, and takes its inspiration from the Enclosed Gardens of Mechelen, a set of extraordinary polychrome wooden cabinets created in the 16th century, which open up to reveal a paradisiacal wonderland of flowers, fruits and insects made of wire, wax and gold leaf.

The title is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and alludes to the transformation of Hyacinthus into a flower following his death. De Bruyckere’s artwork, which is the colour of rust and matted earth, is created from materials the artist found in her home — old floorboards and strips of wallpaper — and from wax casts of animal skins which she sculpted into large, withering petals. There are also bone-like casts taken from barkless trees riddled with woodworm.

‘I love this idea of transformation,’ she says, ‘of growing into something else. It is forced and unfree but at the same time inspires hope: nothing disappears or ends; it always continues and changes.’

20th and 21st Century Art summer sales at Christie’s in London are now on view until 26 June 2024. The season opens with Marc Chagall — a Dialogue of Self and Soul (bidding online until 26 June), followed by Picasso Ceramics and the Post-War to Present Online Sale (until 1 July). The Post-War to Present live auction takes place on 27 June