Wool Blanket, 2015

Berlinde De Bruyckere is a Belgian artist who creates challenging and haunting sculptural installations in a range of media, including wool, wood, wax, horse skin and hair. Explorations of the abject pervade Berlinde De Bruyckere's practice, specifically her reconfigurations of the human body into new and troubling forms. Her work on the body began in the early 1990s. Initially, it was marked by its absence, as De Bruyckere draped furniture with woollen blankets (a response to news reports she had witnessed of Rwandan refugees wrapped in blankets). Later her sculptural works incorporated wax bodies covered in wool. Berlinde De Bruyckere went on to deploy the bodies of horses in works that create a startling and disturbing tension between form and matter. The artist's preoccupation with the abject places her work within the contexts of the Bataillean narrative of surrealism and the concerns of feminist art theory. Berlinde De Bruyckere's 2008 sculptural work, 'Marthe' exemplifies not only the psychological concept of the abject, but also the artist's preoccupation with ideas of metamorphosis. Constructed from wax, epoxy, metal, wood and glass, it reimagines the contorted human body transforming into a new and unsettling form. In 2000, 'In Flanders Field', an installation of casts of fivedead horses covered in horse hide, was displayed at Ypres, as a comment on the horrors of war. This breakthrough work led to an invitation to participate in the 2003 Venice Biennale where Berlinde De Bruyckere exhibited 'Black Horse'; a work that established the artist on the international scene.