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28/3/2012

Berlinde De Bruyckere

Kunsthalle Wien, Wien

curated by Cornelia Wieg (Stiftung Moritzburg, Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt), Lucas Gehrmann (Kunsthalle Wien)

Though the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, born in 1964, might definitely be described as a shooting star in view of her career in the international art world, she herself does not attach any importance to such classifications. What matters to her rather are special solo presentations which she may co-curate.

This is how the exhibition series “Into One-Another ...” was conceived, which was presented in the Stiftung Moritzburg in Halle for the first time (2011), before it was shown in the Kunstmuseum Bern in a different form.

For her presentation in the project space of the Kunsthalle Wien, the artist, taking the exhibition space and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting Hercules and Antaeus borrowed for it into account, has created two works which will be on display here for the first time. First of all, Berlinde De Bruyckere‘s work touches us because of its emotional intensity. Her expressively deformed, yet apparently realistic body sculptures reflect existential issues like suffering, pain, anxiety, and death. “These subjects may be found in all forms of art at all times, in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and even in film. Apart from all these visual impressions, it is everyday life from which I draw my inspiration; pictures in newspapers and on TV. These are as important for my production as works by old masters,” the artist says. Her exhibition in Vienna is a space-related confrontation of her own sculptures with an original painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder and selected film works by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Cranach’s and Pasolini’s body languages enter into a dialogue with De Bruyckere’s fragmentary waxen body images, which lack all “telling” exterior elements: gaze, head, gestures, attributes. The animal nature that becomes particularly manifest in these sculptures instead relates them to a kind of nature that seems to hold a mystery: the secret of life and death.

“Death is not what is beautiful in De Bruyckere’s work; beautiful is the painting with which she covers her epoxy forms: red and blue pigments are applied in wafer-thin wax layers so that the artificial surface looks like both an abstract painting and human skin. The interplay of white, reddish, and bluish splotches makes the sculptures deceptively genuine.” (Susanne Schreiber)

Considering the exacerbation of acts of violence and catastrophes, the growth of medical possibilities, and the increasing dominance of media-generated processes, De Bruyckere‘s works radiate a challenging ethical relevance. While religion once endowed suffering, wounds, and death with a meaning, the understanding of man has become a matter of individual responsibility with the loss of religion’s authority. The presence of Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures transforms the suffering bodies into incorporations of topical questions concerning our time, its image of man, and its concept of humaneness.

The confrontation of film as art with her work and Lucas Cranach’s allows the medium to unfold its visual power in a completely different context than that we are used to: questioning the corporeal as a human given extending to man’s archaic depths, a series of selected films by Pier Paolo Pasolini lends her position an additional dimension. Bruyckere,

Berlinde De Bruyckere born in 1964, lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. She studied at the Sint-Lucas Instituut in Ghent from 1982 to 1986. In 1990, she received the Jeune Peinture Belge Award. Since the late 1980s, she has been invited to show her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions; a solo presentation in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 2003 and an invitation to the 4 Berlin Biennial were followed by solo shows at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London, and New York, in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, in the Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, in the Stiftung Moritzburg, Halle, the Kunstmuseum Bern.

Berlinde De Bruyckere‘s presentation at the Kunsthalle Wien has been realized in cooperation with the Stiftung Moritzburg, Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt.

Special thanks to the Gallery of Paintings of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Hauser & Wirth, London. During the exhibition, the installation Pasolinicode 02212011 by the film maker Ludwig Wüst, which explores Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s still mysterious death, will be on show in the slide show room of the Kunsthalle’s project space.

Press contact: Katharina Murschetz phone: +43-1-521 89-1221 presse@kunsthallewien.at

Press breakfast: Thursday, March 29, 2012, 11 a.m.; the artist is present
Opening : Thursday, March 29, 2012, 7 p.m.
Kunsthalle Wien
Museumsplatz 1 - Wien
Daily from 1 p.m. to midnight, Sun and Mon from 1 to 7 p.m

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