Berlinde De Bruyckere

Photo by Céline Clanet

The artist in her Ghent studio. Her works may be harrowing, but she calls herself "a happy woman and a happy mother."

Maurizio Cattelan Dirk Bouts Peter Buggenhout Lucas Cranach the Elder Jan van Eyck Hubert van Eyck Luca Giordano Giotto di Bondone

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For 23 years, Berlinde De Bruyckere has been making her haunting wax sculptures in a 19th-century neo-Gothic former Catholic boys school in the harbor district of Ghent, Belgium. Her studio is a series of cavernous, light-filled former classrooms that look out through tall windows on a stand of trees in a central courtyard and are connected by long, drafty hallways. Upstairs, a similar configuration serves as the studio of her husband, the sculptor Peter Buggenhout. Along with their two sons, ages 11 and 3, the couple lives in a two-story structure that is connected to the school and once served as the headmaster’s residence.

At 44, De Bruyckere has an ascetic air: She sports no-nonsense, close-cropped hair and speaks in a slow, considered way. More often than not her face wears the intense, thoughtful expression you might expect from someone whose work grapples with the universal themes of life and death, suffering and solace. She filters the imagery and emotions of the greatest Old Master works through the lens of present-day atrocities, creating life-size wax and horsehide figures that are, as she puts it, "both frightening and comforting."

It’s impossible to walk the length of her studio without glimpsing her sources of inspiration. Pinned to the wall opposite a bookcase overflowing with monographs on Giotto, Dirk Bouts and other masters are reproductions of paintings by the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder, whom she studies for "how he paints skin, how he deforms his models," and Matthias Grünewald, whose Isenheim Altarpiece she describes in rapturous tones. Next to these are placed ephemera, such as a magazine clipping about an Abu Ghraib torture victim. "Not so much has changed," De Bruyckere tells me, looking at reproductions of two paintings by the 17th-century master Luca Giordano depicting bound, writhing figures: Saint Bartholomew about to be flayed and Prometheus awaiting the eagle that will gouge out and devour his liver. "There is still brutality. You see the same things in Guantánamo, in Iraq."

De Bruyckere selected the Giordanos to accompany her wax sculpture of two conjoined male figures in the exhibition "Berlinde de Bruyckere/Luca Giordano: We Are All Flesh," running until May 2 at the space on Old Bond Street that her London gallery, Hauser & Wirth, shares with the Old Master dealer Colnaghi. Having her work displayed alongside historical pieces is nothing new for De Bruyckere: The dealer, tastemaker and all-around aesthete Axel Vervoordt included her in his Wunderkammer of a show "Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art," which extended over several floors of Venice’s Palazzo Fortuny two years ago, as well as in a similar display in the chapel of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts last September.

It’s telling that De Bruyckere’s residence and studio are tucked away in De Muide, a neighborhood, once home to dockworkers and now popular with a recent influx of immigrants, that is 10 minutes north of the city’s touristic center. Here she is closer to a cluster of well-preserved medieval buildings — including the Saint Bavo Cathedral, which houses Hubert and Jan Van Eyck’s famous Ghent Altarpiece — than to any art world hot spot.

De Bruyckere became fascinated with the Old Masters as a child. Born in Ghent, she was sent at age five to a boarding school outside the city, where she spent much of her time holed up in a library, poring over art books. "It was a self-made study and a way to get away from the school, the nuns," she says. "The history of Catholic art was my escape."

At 16 she returned to Ghent and enrolled in the Sint-Lucas Visual Arts school. Not long after graduating, she became known in Belgium and Holland for spare sculptures consisting mainly of woolen blankets, sometimes simply stacked on tables or beds. In response to news footage of blanket-swathed refugees in Rwanda, she began adding wax legs sticking out from the coverlets. So convincing was one of these that when she installed it in a pool of water in Holland, it was mistaken for a corpse, causing an uproar in the local media.