Berlinde De Bruyckere

Place: Ghent

Born: 1964

Biography:

Berlinde De Bruyckere is a Belgian contemporary artist who works in sculpture and installation. Her sculptures use body-like forms and are influenced by religious imagery, mythology, and the Flemish Renaissance. Themes in her artwork display human experience, existence, and raw emotion. De Bruyckere was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1964. Her dad worked as a butcher, which desensitized her to seeing corpses. De Bruyckere's studio in Ghent was once a Catholic school, and what used to be the headmaster's home is where her family live. At the beginning of her artistic career, she had to convince her parents to let her go to the art academy, and in order to fund her studies, she gave drawing lessons. De Bruyckere uses a variety of mediums, such as animal skin, wood, metal, watercolor, and gouache. Before working on the life-size sculptures for her exhibitions, De Bruyckere would make a scale model of the artwork rather than sketching it out. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, De Bruyckere would make large cast wax sculptures of human figures. Specifically in the early 1990s many of her major works have featured structures involving blankets. Their use is symbolic both of warmth and shelter, and of the vulnerable circumstances such as wars that make people seek such shelter. As De Bruyckere works on her piece, she pays attention to the details, such as the surfaces of her work, to express the meaning of her art. Additionally, she tends to use props that connect with her story's artwork.