De Bruyckere had a breakthrough in 2000, when the In Flanders Fields Museum, in the town of Ypres, site of a legendary World War I battle, invited her to make a work dealing with the conflict. She delivered five life-size splay-legged horses captured in their death throes. Three years later, her place on the international scene was secured with the inclusion in the 2003 Venice Biennale, directed by the curator Francesco Bonami, of her sculpture Black Horse, depicting an equine form curled up in the center of a table. Her Lichaam (Corpse), 2006, a horsehide draped over a table, was in that year’s Berlin Biennial, organized by the artist Maurizio Cattelan and the curators Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni.

Last fall De Bruyckere had her first New York solo show, at Yvon Lambert. It featured life-size, lugubrious (as several critics described them) wax figures: a hulking fragment of a horse perched dramatically on a table set in the center of the gallery and surrounded by a group of human forms. The latter all lacked heads, which she says would detract from their universality, and their pale flesh-colored bodies were contorted, knobby, one of them seemingly no more than a hanging slab of meat and two others standing bent at the waist, their arms morphing into tree branches. It’s challenging subject matter. "She never compromises," says Yvon Lambert.

Gioni, now a curator at New York’s New Museum, included in the institution’s fall 2008 show "After Nature" de Bruyckere’s Robin V, 2007, a prostrate wax figure in a glass vitrine, its arms and torso exploding, like the Lambert sculptures, into a profusion of tree limbs. "Berlinde has imagined an entire universe that goes from medieval sculpture to contemporary life, all the way to Futurist dystopia," he says.

With their distortions, De Bruyckere’s pieces are hardly easy to live with, but they appeal to a set of adventurous and thoughtful collectors. The New York-based oncologist Marc Straus, who with his wife, Livia, owns three of the artist’s wax sculptures, says he sees the works "in relation to the concept that in cancer there is something growing out of control that the body can’t contain. That is frightening. But her work is also beautiful."

That multivalent effect often begins with images culled from De Bruyckere’s watercolors and drawings but ultimately results from a process that she began to develop some 15 years ago, when she was conceiving her blanket women and looking for a material that would render the jutting legs as lifelike as possible. Madame Tussauds popped into her mind, and she started experimenting with wax. Now she and her team of assistants — three women in their 20s and 30s — have perfected the technique.

De Bruyckere trained as a painter and still thinks of herself as one. This becomes apparent in the crucial final stages of each sculpture: After making silicone casts of horse or human bodies, each part done separately so that she can reassemble them creatively, she brushes on layers of melted colored wax, using as many as 15 hues in one sculpture. This layering accounts for the eerily realistic splotches of red and blue, representing veins, abrasions or contusions. The pots, pans and burners arrayed on the studio’s tables lend it an alchemical air.

She points to a wax sculpture in progress perched atop a high wooden plinth. It’s slated for the Spedale di Santa Fina, a hospital in the medieval Tuscan hill town San Gimignano, home to her Italian gallery, Continua. A 15th-century wooden crucifixion recently discovered there is her inspiration. The figure’s pose is roughly based on photographs of an emaciated model curled over his bent legs. For the colors, she refers to the green and blue flesh tones of a 17th-century figure painted by Andrea Vaccaro, a reproduction of which is attached to the wall.

When De Bruyckere is not manipulating wax limbs, she’s wrestling with horsehides. In another work in progress, she is experimenting with a new approach: Using the same molding she employed for the massive wax equine sculpture in New York, she will construct one side in skins and the other in cast iron — a new material for her — to convey, she says, "the heaviness of death." On a nearby wall are photographs of the model she used, a bloodstained carcass in the Ghent University equine clinic. Such images don’t faze De Bruyckere, whose father once owned a butcher shop down the street from her studio.