Berlinde De Bruyckere

13 June - 24 July 2010

Zürich

Horse, deer and man metamorphose in Berlinde De Bruyckere's exhibition for Hauser & Wirth Zürich. De Bruyckere's work deals with death and transfiguration and looks to stories and art of the past to address anxieties that remain current. Her sculptures accomplish an almost alchemical transformation of wax into flesh, and out of this fantastical realism she creates intolerably mutated bodies: figures lack heads, borrow and reconfigure anatomies, become amorphous, vegetal and abstract. Their distortions emphasise our own fragile existence. 'I want to show how helpless a body can be,' De Bruyckere has said. 'Which is nothing you have to be afraid of — it can be something beautiful.'

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About the Artist

Berlinde De Bruyckere

Working with casts made of wax, animal skins, hair, textiles, metal and wood, Berlinde De Bruyckere renders haunting distortions of organic forms. The vulnerability and fragility of man, the suffering body—both human and animal—and the overwhelming power of nature are some of the core motifs of De Bruyckere’s oeuvre.

Current Exhibitions