Last fall, while Berlinde De Bruyckere was working long days putting the finishing touches on her large, broody wax sculptures of naked, distorted, headless human figures, she received an intriguing invitation from a friend, urging her to see a performance of a dance piece, Pitie (Pietà) by choreographer Alain Platel’s company Les Ballets C de la B. The friend, she recalls, told her, "If your sculptures could move, they would move in this way." De Bruyckere saw the piece, which she describes as "very sad," and was struck by the similarities to her work, especially in one particular sequence, wherein two men entered into a writhing embrace, one lifting the other off the floor. It was the mirror image of one of the sculptures she’d just completed, of two contorted figures arranged on a low wooden plinth. She wrote to Platel, who explained, to her astonishment, that as he was preparing Pitie he’d been looking at a book about her work. To complete the cycle of collaboration, in late February De Bruyckere used two of Platel’s dancers as models for a new sculpture: two angular figures on a rough-hewn wooden table, backs arched, supine bodies intertwined, as though they’d wrestled themselves into one another.

De Bruyckere, 44, lives and works in a neo-Gothic former Catholic boys’ school in the quiet harbor district of Ghent, Belgium, 10 minutes from historical buildings like the Saint Bavo Cathedral, which houses Hubert and Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. It’s an appropriate setting for an artist whose work strikes a delicate balance between the past, the present, and the possible future, exploring universal themes of life and death, suffering, and solace, and drawing from such sources as the Old Masters, the nightly news, and recent postapocalyptic novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The sculpture for which Platel’s dancers posed was inspired by — and exhibited alongside (at Hauser & Wirth, London, this past spring) — two paintings of bound, muscular male figures by the Baroque Neapolitan master Luca Giordano. One depicts Prometheus, about to have his liver gouged out and consumed by an eagle, and the other shows a contorted Saint Bartholomew, about to be flayed. As De Bruyckere explains, "I start with a problem in my mind, then I go to look for the right composition or models, the right materials to translate it." The dancers were perfect models because she "needed expressive bodies."

De Bruyckere’s focus on the human figure evolved from her early-1990s work, in which secondhand woolen blankets — potent metaphors, as she saw them, for everything from comfort and shelter to shame and vulnerability — were stacked on tables or on beds, or draped across chairs. In 1994, images of the Rwandan genocide occasioned the first of what she calls her "blanket women" — abject wax figures with all but their legs swathed in wool. She wanted the figures’ limbs to look as lifelike as possible, and thoughts of Madame Tussauds led her to wax. In 2000, she discovered what would become another central motif: the horse. While an artist in residence at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, site of one of World War I’s most brutal battles, she made an installation consisting of five horses, frozen in death throes and arrayed on tables.

In De Bruyckere’s studio, pale light floods through tall windows facing a tree-lined courtyard, illuminating the reproductions pasted to the walls (paintings by Cranach the Elder and Matthias Grünewald, photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib), vaguely alchemical-seeming pots and burners used to melt the wax for her sculptures, and the timeworn socles and cabinets that serve as supports. Next to her most recent horse sculpture (made partly out of iron, a new material for her that, she says, conveys "the heaviness of death") are photographs of horse corpses taken at the local university’s veterinary clinic, where she goes to cast them. Such sights hardly faze De Bruyckere, whose father once ran a butcher shop around the corner from her studio. On top of her filing cabinets are stacks of white cushions bearing splotches of wax; she used these in a recent sculpture, Pietà (2007-08), placing them under a figure draped across a wooden bench, as though taking care to make it comfortable. "I want to show how helpless a body can be. Which is nothing you have to be afraid of — it can be something beautiful." 

"The Way of All Flesh" originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' Summer 2009 Table of Contents.