She has a longstanding arrangement with the clinic: When a horse dies, the veterinarians alert her so that she can come and cast it. Despite the fact that her process is entirely humane — the skins come from a man in Brussels who otherwise prepares them for the leather industry — an animal-rights group once took umbrage at an outdoor sculpture in Holland in which she strung a series of horse figures from trees.

De Bruyckere considers the supports for her pieces integral to them. She used to scavenge for the wooden tables and vitrines — always secondhand, like her blankets — but now works with a furniture dealer in Antwerp. In her studio is a cabinet from a ceramics museum in France, with several wax limbs piled inside, and a vitrine, from a museum of African art in Ghent, that awaits a horse sculpture — a spherical composite of two animals’ hides. Stacked on filing cabinets are white cushions that De Bruyckere sometimes places between her creations, which she thinks of as vulnerable beings, and the surfaces on which they rest, as in Piëta, 2007-08, a headless male figure stretched supine on a bed of pillows, its spindly legs dangling onto the floor. "I wanted to show how helpless a body can be," she says. "And the beauty of that body."

The artist insists that her sculptures are never strictly narrative, but stories of all kinds influence her. While working on the pieces for the Yvon Lambert show, she and her assistants discussed Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 novel The Road, in which a man and his young son traverse a postapocalyptic landscape. "The way the father was always telling his son that everything will be okay," she says, "it’s about giving hope and your love for your child."

An old-fashioned humanist, De Bruyckere says she is happy to see the go-go art market cool off. It made her uncomfortable even as it helped her own prices, and she feels that the current economic downturn, together with the change of administration in the United States, may bring some attention to the issues she explores: vulnerability, personal responsibility, human contact and caring for others.

"It’s been hard making this type of work," she says. "A lot of people think I’m depressed. But I’m a happy woman and a happy mother. Certain things in the world make me feel helpless. I hope people look to my work and find something that can help them." "Berlinde De Bruyckere" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.